Fugue State speaks to the potential loss of the tangible photograph in future generations. I observe my children, part of the most documented generation in history, creating thousands of images for their social media outlets, but am painfully aware that they have never made a photographic print and will most likely have no physical photographs to pass down to their grandchildren. This loss of something tangible to be circulated through the decades reflects the fading away of specific memories and identities, and the loss of cultural and familial histories in forms that we associate with family preservation.
The photographs created for this series sit in an in-between space of the future and the past, demonstrating the clash between images and materiality, where materiality, unfortunately, seems to be losing ground. For this project, after creating analog portraits of people in my life, I have damaged the emulsion of my negatives, wounding the film stock with a variety of chemicals. I then reinterpret the image in the digital darkroom in the original, negative state where the potential for both the restoration and erasure of memory are present. I am in fact, damaging my own photographic legacy to call attention to this shift from the physical to the visual.
Aline Smithson is the founder of Lenscratch, a daily journal on photography. In 2016, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum commissioned Smithson to create work for the Faces of Our Planet Exhibition. In 2018 and 2019, her work was exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in London as part of the Taylor Wessing Prize. The Magenta Foundation published her retrospective monograph, “Self & Others: Portrait as Autobiography.” Kris Graves Projects published her book, “LOST II: Los Angeles.” Peanut Press released her monograph, “Fugue State,” in Fall of 2021. Her books are in the collections of the Getty Museum; the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Metropolitan Museum; the Guggenheim; and the Museum of Modern Art, among others. In 2022, she was named a Hasselblad Heroine.
