Experimental Photography: Kate Steciw

Charlotte Cotton:

I want to start by touching upon the timeline of your photographic practice, which spans quite an epic period in photography’s story. A brief summary in rough chronological order, starting in the mid-2000s includes the almost wholesale shift from photographic film to digital image capture; Photoshop becoming an artistic medium in its own right; Web 2.0 and the circulation of images; the rapid ascendance of social media platforms; development of new printing and 3D imaging technologies. Looking back, how much of this radical shift in photographic processes informed your artistic choices?

Kate Steciw:

It was quite by accident that I found myself working with software and screens. I had student debt and found myself working as a lab assistant in a high-end retouching studio in 2004. I was surrounded by computers, other people’s images and my own growing archive of images captured on my camera phone so I learned to work with what I had immediately available to me. The financial, temporal and technological restrictions I faced when I graduated from SAIC [School of the Art Institute of Chicago], were exactly what led me to the work I make now. I naturalized desktop software because I had no studio and no camera of my own. Because I was physically unable to make the work I wanted to make, I played and made marks and sent funny images to friends and before long, something more serious and substantive started to happen. It was never my goal or my intent to make work like this – just a byproduct of boredom, curiosity and the basic impulse to make something...anything. I have a lot of faith in that impulse both in myself and others. Photography and its derivative practices are such a convenient and fertile place for contemporary humans to connect with that impulse. If you have a phone, not only can you make a ‘thing’ but you can also share it with whomever you like instantaneously which is really the point at the end of the day – to share.

Charlotte Cotton:

You have used images you found online as a main ‘source’ for your works and in the exhibition text, I quote your definition of the use-value of the ubiquitous JPEG image file format as, 'not a tool of precision but rather of subjective storytelling'. First and foremost, you are categorizing JPEGs as a medium, and one that is loaded with meaning and narrative - the social system of which is determined by the vast field of networked images. I like the way that you directly link the default format for image files with a 'subjective' creative space. How did you get to that space?

Kate Steciw:

At a certain point in my experience, JPEGs separated from what could be traditionally thought of as a photograph. An analogue photographic negative is – as an objective record of a chemical interaction – fixed. I think the fact that a JPEG is in a process of destruction without a referential ‘original’ is very interesting. The JPEG is a default system of compression (a stream of bytes) rather than an image itself (which is lost to us in instantaneous compression). At the time, JPEGs and other compression protocols were the unavoidable default output of most consumer-grade image capture technology. So, there was this byproduct of an image, a versioning of the 'original' built into our experience of images and the expectation of online dissemination of ‘image-artifacts’ that would be altered with each subsequent compression. The JPEG carries certain aesthetic markers that tell the story of its own journey through networked space. In recent years, I have been increasingly interested in incorporating these markers as aesthetic choices in the works. Rather than try to obscure these attributes, I treat resolution and compression much in the same way a painter would consider viscosity, flow or opacity as properties of a the medium.

Charlotte Cotton:

I also think of you as an artist who is consciously re-animating and calling upon earlier experimental art-making moments. Your works included in Experimental Photography are part of your ongoing Construction series that naming immediately summons up early twentieth century avant garde art movements, including Russian Constructivism, when artists were facing their own ‘image explosion’ [the rise of photomechanical reproduction in printed newspapers and magazines] and upending the distinctions between artistic mediums, and the roles of art and artists. How would you describe your relationship with art and photography’s histories, do you identify with them?

Kate Steciw:

I identify strongly with the early twentieth century time period you mention for exactly the reason you describe. I think when a culture is faced with a new level of image proliferation, a kind of crisis of looking occurs and artists are charged with the task of bearing witness to that crisis, which on some level, conscious or not, is experienced by all, by exploring and exploiting the limits of its impact. As far as the histories of photography impact upon me, I feel most engaged with the practices derived from photography – collage and composites in particular. It seems the introduction of any reproduction or editing hardware or software produces a compulsion to reconcile with the visual strangeness that is being generated. In that way, it’s the moments where advances in image capture technology and editing, or publishing technology coincide to change the way that we see the world around all of us that are most compelling to me.

Charlotte Cotton:

There’s something very aligned with discovery and experimentation in what you are saying – beyond photography and imaging behaviours – something universally human and curious.

Kate Steciw:

I am thinking of the scene in the Stanley Kubrick film, 2001: A Space Odyssey when the monkeys are interacting with the object that suddenly appears in their midst – something new arrives on the scene and I am faced with a new evolutionary path, but first I ask myself these questions; What do I do with this? How do I interact with it? Do I try to alter it? Does it alter me? Am I to eat this?! I feel like a cavewoman in the digital realm. I want to make a thing mine, make a mark on it, preserve it, or keep it through making this mark. The gesture feels clumsy but satisfying if only in its hope. The impulse is pre-painting, pre- sculpture. It’s a visceral and urgent response that is hard to describe.

Charlotte Cotton:

How would you describe the impact of our image environment [I am grouping photography and computational images together here] upon the choices that you make – or the viewership you anticipate – for your work? I think I am asking you about the call that your work makes for us to pay attention, and the explicit subjectivity that you construct for our viewership.

Kate Steciw:

I am definitely a product of contemporary networked image culture in the sense that compositing and sharing are central to the practice. The impulse is to create artworks that shares questions is not unlike the motivations of meme culture. There’s an element of the shared joke, a nod to the absurdity but also the power of our current relationship to images. The content, colour palate and compositions are so familiar to us – engrained in so much of our daily experience. There is also a drive to transcend that heavily prescribed power relationship within image culture. Can an indecipherable cell phone image, a stock image of pasta and a screengrab from a popular television program be composited in Photoshop and work together to create something sublime? Can these kinds of images move beyond their prescribed use and become something else – something that shifts our perception, if even for a moment, to a new set of possibilities both for the image and the image-maker? In that sense, whether I am working with digital collage or more sculptural interventions, there’s a basic underlying desire to create a pause in our prolific viewing experience.