ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Worthy Memories

America has been groomed.  Since the manufacture of Kodak’s first mass-produced cameras, we have been instructed what to capture on that magical piece of light sensitive film.  Kodak’s relentless and pervasive advertising campaigns sold America on the company’s idealized version of our “every day”.  The Company bombarded society with marketing that suggested we chronicle our lives with snapshots, which would in time prove more reliable and accurate than our own memory.  Kodak was in truth teaching us to perpetuate an illusion—a romanticized narrative of our personal lives.  We have been groomed to turn our life events (weddings, childhood, vacations) into commodities that conform to the look of a “Kodak moment”, thus enforcing the perception of happiness and stability. 

My re-creations of iconic Kodak advertisements illustrate that the majority of our lives are anything but “Kodak moments”.  If we believe what Kodak declared, that nothing is too ordinary to photograph, then these are my Kodak moments.  While Kodak is not the only corporation guilty of imposing its views on society, the Company was a major force in determining how America approached photography.  Kodak helped shape our idea of what a photograph is and should be.  And perhaps, that is why so many of us confuse photographs with reality.

These images were made with an Omega 4x5 large format studio camera, using both Kodak Tri-X and Fuji Provia film. The negatives were scanned and then modified in Adobe Photoshop and printed on an Epson 2200 printer.