instability

instability is a collaboration with Eric Zeigler. The photobook was published in November 2024 by Snap Collective.

instability is available for purchase direct from Snap Collective

Seventeen of the more than 100 images in the book are shown here.

Artist Statement

Watch for long enough, and anything that appears to be stable will reveal its true perpetual state of instability. But imaging devices record single glances of the world: Crack! Trees fall, shutters snap, photographs are fixed. We have been conditioned to expect a photograph to capture decisive moments, but how do we know which ones are decisive? Further, when we overlay the fixed objectif-icity of still images on film, paper, and glowing screens onto our expectations of how the world “works,” we are subconsciously disregarding change and misinterpreting the instability of the reality we live in.

In instability, we portray this instability through more than 100 images that we created from 2020 through 2024 using contemporary versions of 19th-century dry collodion plates, 20th-century film, and new digital technologies. Together, these different methods expand our visual range while challenging interpretations of the assumed objective reality of a photograph and illuminating contradictions in 21st-century narratives of environmental stability and preservation. Following the suggestion of Walter Benjamin, we work to “attain a conception of history that is in keeping with the tradition of the oppressed, which teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” With these photographs, we reclaim the aesthetics behind the myths of the Westward Expansion, the American Frontier, and similar colonialist activities that have occurred throughout the world; we record modern ecosystems deemed healthy and stable only because we’ve left them alone. For example, the economic progress flowing down rivers and onto the transcontinental railroads ironically created the context for preservation of old-growth forests—tiny islands of nature within a vast ocean of unchecked development. Are these reserves or theme parks? Are they really stable, unchanging, and “unimpaired?” How are they connected to the human-modified environments around them? The essence of their ongoing and essential decay, normally hidden behind an opaque, yet gossamer fog, is unveiled in this series of striking photographs.

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