Dissolving Boundaries of the Self

An autobiographical photographic narrative built from myth, memory, historical appropriation, fabricated artifacts and competing systems of archival authority. It grew from an existential crisis around suburban life in the American South and my years at Catholic military school.

I made photographic objects on glass and tin, then scratched, corroded and cracked them to resemble damaged historical plates, some carrying handwritten notations from an archival system that never existed. I then photographed selected plates as though they had entered a new institutional collection, with measurements, condition reports and psychological descriptions.

Each plate holds several histories at once: its material fact, an institutional record, a mythology and a psychoanalytic reading, each written by a different author for a different audience. None cancels the others. The subtitle, a rhizomatic psycho-history, names the structure: many entries, no single root. The work asks who holds a photograph’s story, and for whom it is told, and finds that the archive’s authority is part of its fiction.

It is where the practice began: an archive that did not exist, made by hand and given competing histories, a problem every later work has returned to.