Artist Statement

I am attracted to meticulous processes that embrace elements of chance and produce one-of-a-kind results. I am trying to discover more than control and consider photography itself my principle subject matter. Most photographs successfully avoid the truth and fascinate me because their lies are so plausible. This is material photography, as in materialism: the theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and all being, processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations of matter.

I started working with photographic paper directly in ambient light in 1991 while living in the mountains in Guatemala. The images involve no optics, no camera, no darkroom, just the primary elements of photography: light sensitive paper, chemicals, light. The paper is exposed, directly to ambient light and chemistry is applied by pouring, dripping, patting, splattering, splashing. Treated this way, the paper develops not in black and white but in a multitude of colors. The resulting image is the very object exposed to light, without intermediary, like Daguerreotypes and other photographic processes that engender neither negative nor copy. I also started making pinhole photographs in Guatemala. In contrast to the ambient light pieces, pinhole photographs register scenes thanks to the order that light acquires when it passes through a tiny hole.

Bruce McKaig
2004