Rebecca Diederichs | commentary

Meeting Lorraine

Intrigued with the ways we describe encounters and the kind of choices we make to construct a narrative, I decided to build a story about Loraine, painted by J. W. Beatty in 1931. I compiled image fragments culled directly from a digital photographic of Beatty’s painting and from a selection of my own snapshots: an image of a person looking through binoculars, the others objects and scenic images. Installed together in a grid, demarcated by the wide white borders of each print mimicking the format of instant polaroids, the collection of fragments compose a kind of narrative or telling that describes the moment of meeting. I later used this strategy of building composition from selected photographic excerpts in 2010 when making Telling of Green. Both this later work and Meeting Loraine, 1931/2008, are evidence of a desire to inscribe experience or provide a transcription, photographically: visual text written on and affected by the transitional and translational qualities of photographic transcription.

Rebecca Diederichs

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