Wish You Were Here
Muscle Memory Collective
Modern Medicine
A House, A Home
To Throw a Football
Volley
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Wish You Were Here explores modern image culture and how popular places – whether encountered through travel, folklore, or digital circulation – carry traces of collective longing for community, meaning, and ritual. I create digital collages utilizing a plethora of social media photographs from the most-tagged location in each U.S. state. The collages appear as single photographs at first glance, but upon closer inspection they dissolve into glitches, layers, and ghostly echoes. Each scene is composed of individual elements from dozens of analogous, vernacular social media images.
In this experimental practice, I reimagine this ubiquitous source material from publicly available archives into a new photographic form. The collages are translated into ambrotypes – unique photographic glass plates – by employing an analog wet-plate collodion process, and the resulting plates are backed by gradients derived from recurring colors in the source photographs. The tension between analog and digital, single image and media stream, interrogates how contemporary imaging technologies blur public and private realms, shaping collective visual narratives that celebrate, mediate, and perpetuate human experience. In particular, this project asks how participants on social media platforms interpret recurring themes and negotiate personal experience in the physical world through the creation, dissemination and consumption of digital images.
The source images themselves embody a collective urge to visit celebrated places, and to document and share the experience within a shared photographic archive. By turning personal pilgrimages into public signposts, the snapshots map a mutual appetite for the sublime in an increasingly mediated world, while transforming individual travel into a communal visual language. The synthesized images embrace this emerging photographic language and its associated rituals by emphasizing popular vantage points, creating blended, fictional landscapes by merging distinct spatial elements, and the including asynchronous, anonymous, multi-layered figures. Wish You Were Here is a technicolor dreamscape that aims to highlight the significance of ever-growing, vernacular, social media archives.