Cameron Crone
Sunday, 25 September 2011
Work from his oeuvre.
“I was trained as a photographer, but I never made photos like Lee Friedlander or Robert Frank. By that, I mean I never had a mode of working where I would go out into the world and make photographs intuitively. I made photos of specific things that I was drawn to for their sculptural properties. With the series Touchfree, I photographed automatic car washes, which are super decorated minimal structures. Ultimately, I was more interested in the objects than in the work’s photographic qualities.
Then, I started collecting these gnarled sticks and photographing them against patterned fabric backgrounds. Eventually, I took the sticks out of the pictures. I ended up with these quasi-abstract Op-Art photographs, and in studio visits, people kept asking me how these images would exist out in the world. Up until that point I had printed everything on traditional photo paper, but I decided to print these works out on fabric. I liked that they were pictures of fabric printed on fabric, and the transition from photo paper to fabric brought them into a dialogue with painting.
With this work, I began considering the way the photo sat as an object in the world, and that opened the door to working with sculpture and installation. Now I tend to sit with my photos a little longer. Sometimes they end up as part of a sculpture, sometimes they end up as a photo in a frame. I wait and see what the work wants…” – via i heart photograph