Tag Archives: art

Campaign Landscapes is a collection of photographs made in venues that once held campaign events.

The photographs, largely devoid of people, show the general area where the stage or crowd were located during campaign events for Barack Obama and John McCain. These venues, functioning as backdrops to a politician, act as an image to either reinforce or narrativize a certain message. They point to the level to which a candidate’s image is controlled and manipulated, but also act as a mirror of the community these campaigns are hoping to court.

A certain seduction exists with security cameras. Safety is manifesting itself beautifully these days.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the index lately, specifically about the sort of “spooky” language that surrounds it. Within the above film the index is turned into an active agent. Rather than something our world is directly mirrored off of, the index in my film is an active agent with its own agenda. As a kid I thought that if someone were to leave a camera in a room overnight, that all sorts of paranormal occurrences might be caught on film. In other words, there was a world teaming underneath our very eyes just waiting to be “captured.” Through this film I’d like to enact that fantasy, but substitute the paranormal with the index, a switch that I think is productive in terms of the language used by Barthes, Lacan and others in writing about the index. I’ve used techniques of film and video that produce “realism” with the express purpose of pointing to an attempt at capturing the index through filmic means.