Dorothy R. Santos

I’ve heard that anybody can be a photographer these days. I’m sure you’ve heard this as well.

From SLRs to point-and-shoots to our mobile phones, people with mobile devices have the ability to make anyone a photographer. Inevitably, this leads to artists having to re-construct and re-purpose such a medium. Anyone can take a picture but how does an artist show, through photography, elements of how we live, who we interact with, and how we know things through contemporary photography?

The photo above was taken while I was traipsing around my girlfriend’s apartment complex backyard. It’s, literally, an insane collection of discarded toys and plastic artifacts. I took pictures and ended up saving them on my phone thinking that I could, possibly, order a print (yes, from my phone, I still think that’s pretty unbelievable myself) if I was inclined. Either way, it was a way for me to record what couldn’t easily be described with words.

Before opening night of the Spread show, the OFFSpace Curatorial team sent a message to their distribution list encouraging individuals to contribute a photo that would be utilized in the Cell Tango (2010) piece by George Legrady and his selected artist Angus Forbes. The collaborative work involved sending a picture to an e-mail created specifically for the show, excluding text in the body of the e-mail, but adding one word descriptors or “tags” of the image in the subject line. When I submitted the above, my tag was “monster”. During the artist panel discussion, I stood in anticipation for my picture to appear. Eventually I saw my “monster” photo grouped with other photos. Legrady explained to audience that the photos sent by the audience were connected and streamed with Flickr photos with the same tags within the community. In Cell Tango, Legrady and Forbes showed the intersections of language and image and our collective understanding of objects and things and even ideas!