Lossy
HK, MO
2025
Photography (Monochrome)
Contact for use.
The first machine that taught me about forgetting was the family computer. In the early nineties, I’d spend hours in Paint, scattering the noise of the spray can and spilling bucket fills into circles and squares, creating BMP files that quickly filled the machine’s small hard drive. There was only space to keep a handful of images; the rest went unsaved and were thus forgotten.
Years later, the camera would inherit that job: deciding, frame by frame, what might be remembered and what would vanish. A machine tuned to loss, it is, at its best, only ever selective, still leaving most of what it sees behind.
I’m walking through the cargo bay of the industrial building. The humidity of summer has lifted, replaced by the scent of burnt coffee.
The camera is in my hand. My own subtraction machine. It takes this singed atmosphere and strips it down to a dithered grid of zeros and ones. Black and white.
It only thinks in simple terms.
A high-definition photograph claims to own what it sees. It pretends that time can be frozen without loss. Hito Steyerl speaks of ‘poor images’, files that degrade as they circulate on the internet, worn down by speed.
But these images are born poor. They don’t need the internet to degrade them; the friction of reality is enough.
That old PC didn’t make it to my teenage years. It was the family’s machine. But the family fractured after mum was gone. By my teenage years, the rest of us had retreated into the private, folding shadows of laptops.
In that new silence, there was only the screeching sound of a modem connecting to the internet. Nowadays, the camera makes no such attempt. It does not scream to be heard. It offers no false promises of connection. It only documents distance.
In the end, the machine does what the brain cannot: it stops. The sensor is a guillotine for time. It forces the noise to stand still, trapping the interference inside the frame.