Aline Smithson
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 the photograph-as-object, as 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. 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 as a way to call attention to this shift from the physical to the visual.
As an analog photographer, I have watched my practice diminished and altered by the loss of materials and methodologies. Over the years I have collected and created hundreds of portraits, some acquired are almost a century old and it’s made me consider the formal portrait in the midst of the shifting sands of photography, the loss of photograph as object, and most importantly, the loss of photographic legacies.
Aline Smithson is a visual artist, editor, and educator. She has exhibited widely including exhibitions at national and international institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Santa Barbara Art Museum, and the Shanghai, Lishui, and Pingyqo Festivals in China. Her work has been featured in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, and PDN. Smithson is the Founder and Editor- in-Chief of Lenscratch, a daily journal on photography. Smithson’s work was twice selected for the Critical Mass Top 50 and in 2016, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum commissioned Smithson to create a series of portraits 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 and included her work in SOLACE and On Death. Peanut Press released her monograph, Fugue State, in Fall of 2021. Her books are in the collections of the Getty Museum, the Los Angeles Contemporary Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, among others. She is a 2022 Hasselblad Heroine.
