NM: As an artist who comes from a sculptural background, where medium and meaning are inseparable, it is natural for me to be a bit of a philanderer where medium is concerned, and to naturally pursue different types of image and object-making. Did you always plan to have these different components, or was that mosaicking something that came to you naturally? Invisibility is a larger project made up of a few different chapters and mediums. LC: Speaking of all these different ways of presenting images, X-Ray Vision vs. This is important because on their own, photographs can sometimes mask their intention, which is detrimental and manipulative towards the people looking at them. When you show a photograph next to a hand-embroidered sculpture of the same image, it pushes you to think about the intentionality of the maker. The materiality is important to me, because I think it holds an emotional meaning that shapes our understanding of an image. The cyanotypes in the body of work called Backscatter Blueprint are photographs that refer to a different kind of photography, and are usually exhibited alongside works that appropriate images in other hand-made ways, resulting in stitcheries, tapestries or objects. Any pixellation seen in this image is an artifact from the source image archive. Cyanotype on watercolor paper of boy being smuggled across the Spanish border illegally. I see the use of photographic processes as an extension of my sculptural practice, which takes the medium of photography itself as the subject matter.īackscatter Blueprint (Homunculus). I then began incorporating found imagery into hand-woven and embroidered objects. When I first started using photography in my work, I used surveillance cameras in performance installations, and videos and still photography as documentation of sculptural performances. My connection to photography has more critical roots, as I often find it to be disappointingly flat, manipulative, and exclusively ocular. But until recently, most of my projects were not photographic in nature. Since those initial encounters with the topic, surveillance imagery, dataveillance and machine vision have continued to be a central focus of my work. Noelle Mason: After reading Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and taking a theoretical class about surveillance during my undergraduate studies, I became increasingly interested in concepts surrounding surveillance. LensCulture: What are your earliest memories of photography’s impact on your creativity? Were you working in other mediums, or did you always have a special connection with photography specifically? Cyanotype on watercolor paper of people being smuggled across the US/Mexico border illegally. We caught up with the artist to discuss how her interest in vision technologies began, and why she thinks it’s important to stray from traditional uses of photography to tell this important story to the world.īackscatter Blueprint (Los Tristes). In her submission, Mason included two chapters from this project, titled Backscatter Blueprint and Ground Control. Invisibility, was selected as the First Place Winner in this year’s LensCulture Art Photography Awards. The multimedia project, titled X-Ray Vision vs. Intrusive x-rays from Border Patrol are printed as cyanotypes, referencing the technical foundation of photography, and are then brought together with hand-woven tapestries that depict areas of conflict at the US-Mexico border-photographs originally made by a satellite. Searching through online databases of digital images, including “backscatter” x-ray photographs, she appropriates seemingly mundane, technical shots and develops them into her own unique pieces. In order to overcome the limitations of these classic stylings, artist Noelle Mason creates a different type of visual work to address the lived experience of undocumented immigrants in the USA. We consume photography on a given topic, only to push it aside and forget about the story as we move onto the next.

But the problem with this format is that it often becomes so internalized that we barely react to the images, dulling their intended impact.

For over a century, photojournalism and documentary photography have provided us with an immediately legible visual rundown of international stories, from political events to natural disasters. The traditional photo essay is something we often search for to inform ourselves on global news.

X ray vision