Prev

Bastien Bilheux

Next

Johann Kööp

Artist Feature

Every week an artist is featured whose single image was published by Der Greif. The Feature shows the image in the original context of the series.

Christopher Valentine - The Unraveling

Feb 23, 2022

The unraveling is a metaphorical daydream set somewhere in-between the reality we know and an alternate interpretation of it.
 
By investigating this made-up imaginary world through encounters in the real world, a return to a childhood-like sense of sight is ever present through means of photography. Oftentimes an idea for an image is made on the spot as a temporary act of sculpture or fabrication to be solidified onto film and then later abandoned in the field, preserved through its image. This playfulness is drawn out through intuition and instinct where shapes, surfaces, and objects come alive before the camera.
 
Incorporating aspects of both the uncanny and the surreal, the images begin to morph together with the world skewing its sense of place and reality. Moving between both straight photography and the manipulated, one begins to question what is real and what isn’t. Through occasional re-photographed images, the seam with reality is split further, obliterating the two-dimensional surface of photographs into a third parallel space. This work examines the razor thin edge of photographs, teetering between truths as well as lies, existing somewhere in-between the visible and the made.