Men under doorway is part of a series of publications that reframe the colonial archive from the British Museum. The men in the photos are natives whose identity wasn’t preserved by the photographer or the museum that owns their images. These locals were turned into objects to make the scale of the ancient Maya structures visible. I work against the original intention of the white European photographer, giving these anonymous natives the protagonism they never had in such “discoveries”. The narrow publication format makes the reader hold the book in such a way that the thumbs touch the men, making the Riso ink to stick to the skin, forcing the reader to touch the archive.

My work originates as a research-based artistic exploration examining archive material and found imagery from physical and digital repositories. Removing the source material from its original context activates these archives using appropriation, image sequencing, and collage, creating new associative meanings, friction, and alternative narratives. This (post-)photographic practice repurposes pre-existing images to answer ontological questions about the nature of images themselves: the status of authorship, ownership, and the technical means of reproduction.

Printed with mist and slate inks in Risograph by myself in The Riso Room at the School of Visual Studies at the University of Missouri. -Publisher