Dresden reliquary: past into present

Afterimage, May-June, 2003

This work deals primarily with what my photographer friend Christine Starke called "the forgotten ones," buildings and factories left in ruins and abandoned--the darker side of Dresden, not the glorious Semper Opera House, for example.

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My photographic projects unfold over time, requiring periods of months to create what I consider a completed series. Much of this work has been done with late 19th and early 20th century extreme large format view cameras using 14" x 17" and 12" x 20" films and making contact prints of the same size. For the connoisseur, a contact print, the result of printing the negative directly onto photographic paper, achieves what many consider the ultimate in a photographic print.

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The finished work is in the form of large scale ink jet prints, currently photographed with a true panoramic camera, producing a view of 146 degrees onto a single negative. Ironically, the Noblex Panoramic was invented and manufactured in Dresden. Thanks to the generous support provided by a Greater Columbus Arts Council International Artist Residency awarded in 2000, I was able to photograph this past summer for a period of eleven uninterrupted weeks in Dresden, Germany.

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With its unique mixture of post-reunification construction, architecture remaining from more than forty years of Communist control, and the rebuilding of the destruction from the infamous firebombing of World War II now in full force, Dresden remains an amalgam of the past and the present, the baroque and the postmodern--the past in the present.

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