Daniel McCullough: Interruptions

Daniel McCullough: Interruptions by Daniel ChungJune 19, 2018

The medium of photography was originally considered a way to objectively represent reality, completely untouched by the photographer’s perspective. However in the work of Daniel McCullough, Interruptions, alterations and manipulations to what lays before his keen, critical eyes becomes the core of his photographic intentions. Yet arbitrary, with each frame Daniel performs a systematic process where he blindly applies surface manipulations on large format negatives before he carries, what can be perceived as rebellious gestures of disruptions, onto his findings. With this deliberate method, he continuously questions the camera’s role in its authenticity, and blurs the fine line between reality and illusion.

Daniel McCullough is a visual artist and photographer based in Milwaukee, WI. Daniel received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 2018, and has exhibited his work locally and nationally. His work investigates the atmosphere of place in both the natural and constructed landscape through intuitive and chance-based approaches to photography.

Interruptions

Interruptions introduces a relationship between constructed imagery and the built environment through chance-based approaches to photography. Using gestures of blind drawing and surface manipulations on sheet film before exposure, I am interested in disrupting the camera’s role as a tool to depict reality and acting in the gap between the camera lens and the world that it renders. Allowing the camera’s depiction of space to be layered with blind drawings provide a distance from more straightforward modes of observation and further disrupts an understanding of what is recorded as real. By integrating these two modes of chance and control, I am interested in an intersection of structure and disorder and allowing the chance-based actions to serve as an expressive language grounded in real environments.