Michael E n s d o r f
The images in the body of work titled Fiction
begin by being digitized from books, maga-
zines, and newspapers. The photographs are
chosen for their historical import as sign-
posts to some of the significant events of
our time. These are the representations of
an era - the images selected for inclusion in
history books, the ones signifying memorable
events. These events seem so far removed
from my own personal sense of history that
I question my belief in any mediated form of
imagery. Ultimately, the Fiction series
represents the confrontation of this dis-
belief. By removing these photos from their
original contexts, and by using a paint program
to add color and text in order to call atten-
tion to the surface of the image, I hope to
question the validity of photography's author-
ity to describe a time, or to define history.
The word "fiction" functions as a label to de-
sensitize the original photograph, and in turn,
the actual event depicted. It references a
staged reality in some images, and the ques-
tioning of a given event in others.
Stemming from a need to investigate the col-
lective non-identity of mostly anonymous
individuals depicted in the digitized media
imagery, the Minor Players series attempts
to lift and extract the participants from
the historical environments. These witnesses
go mostly unnoticed, and their identities will
most likely remain forever shrouded in mystery.
After working with specific images for so long,
a certain familiarity is born that begins to
develop into a fictional reading of their
subjects' identities. I feel I know these faces,
but in reality their closeness to me makes
them even more distant.
process:
The computer is used as a tool in my work.
After the newspaper and magazine images are
digitized and imported into a paint program,
I am allowed the freedom to extract areas of
an image at will. Faces are ñcutî from a
scene and enlarged to fit into the respective
spaces of the individual grids. The amount of
pixelization that occurs is dependent upon the
size of the individual face in the original
photograph; the more distant the person, the
bigger the pixel. The face-grids are then
tone in an image-processing program.
The files are output to slides via a film
-recorder. For traditional exhibition use,
Cibachrome prints are then made from
the slides.
A R T I S T S