Over and Over (2025)
(Three original panels displayed here in seamless succession)
The Theory
Over and Over (2025) studies, abstracts, and destroys images of my body across three phases to capture snapshots of the flawed self-image and damaged relationship with my body that I formed while coming of age as a young gay man with constant access to the internet and social media. Focusing on and interacting with the lasting effects of my departure from a long-term problematic compulsive use of internet pornography, I challenged myself to explore the objectified identity this media enforced in my psyche. When beginning the body of work, I had already worked for years to move beyond this self-image, but nonetheless felt the effects of it while meditating on my experience and my new ritual of capturing these intimate, distorted depictions of my body.
The result was a body of work that allowed me to confront the illegitimacy of my previous self-image while bringing dialogue about problematic use of pornography into the limelight. I believe that to speak and make work about these issues I have faced effectively removes their power over me, and hopefully from others, since the sources of media that encourage this addictive behavior do so by providing user experiences that are defined by shame and social isolation in order to capitalize on users' identities and attention spans.
By translating the images across digital and analogue processes and editing methods, I moved my body beyond the objectified identity that was enforced upon me by internet pornography and social media in pursuit of profit; though the images present the aesthetic of objectification and the abstraction of my body beyond the self-portrait, the process allowed me to assert my own control over my self-image. It let me see the that the images presented here, which are manifestations of a flawed self image, are gross exaggerations of my natural form; I also began to see my body through a lens of casual comfort rather than that of pornographic spectacle, so much so that I felt comfortable sharing this personal story with viewers. I challenged viewers in my in-person introduction of the work to take a look at my body, over and over, just like I had seen so many bodies before, just how I learned to picture myself.
The Process
All images were originally captured on my personal iPhone 15 Pro, often using my phone's built-in flash or Night Mode settings to capture my body in dark environments. The images were then cropped and edited for appearance in iOS Photos. They were then inverted and assigned curves in Photoshop to prepare and print digital negatives on Pictorico Transparency Film. Scaling and re-sampling of the images was also achieved in Photoshop to introduce additional digital degradation of the images and a variety of resolutions across the digital negatives. To produce a body of silver gelatin contact prints of the images in the darkroom, an ideal exposure was achieved with test images and replicated for all prints to achieve a uniform process. Ilford Multigrade Fiber Based Glossy Photo Paper was cut into squares of 4.5x4.5 inches and the digital negatives were center-aligned to create a black border around each developed contact print.
The silver gelatin prints were originally displayed across a three-paneled triptych where each panel hosted a vertical stack of three-image rows, designed to be reminiscent of "the grid" as viewed on a phone, whether on the profiles of social media sites like Instagram or the thumbnails on internet pornography sites. As displayed here, the original prints have been scanned and converted to digital images once more, each border cropped to a slightly tighter width and height but retaining the same aspect ratio (no cropping of the actual image), where the original silver gelatin prints undoubtedly retain more information than these digital representations of the work. This translation between digital and analogue processes, printmaking, and display continues to engage this body of work, which may find itself printed, scanned, or otherwise translated again someday.