Amy Bassin

PROJECT STATEMENT

Achromatic Terrains are altered decades-old vernacular Kodachrome slides that replace landscape colors and flesh tones with spectral flashes of absorbed light and contours that intermediate between natural landscape and ethereal habitats.

These photographs are transformed through drawing, dripping, and spilling ink and bleach on the slides that are then digitally resurrected and printed to reflect an other-worldly take on the future.

Informed by my background in painting, this series invites fresh introspection beyond the representation of a captured photographic reality. By my disruption of traditional photography, I expose the fraught relationship between outward appearance and inner life to reflect on sudden changes in reality, deep inside a drifting memory of wonder.

Although I am not optimistic about what the future holds due to the ravages of Climate Change, the powerful rise of national fascism and the international contagion of pandemic diseases and war, my re-imagined family slides do contain an aesthetic quality of an altered world and people that often borders on a mystical beauty.

In a sense, this series reminds me of Bertolt Brecht’s poem:

“In the dark times,
will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing
about the dark times.”