Paul Burke Inman
Relationships are a primary aspect of life: parents, friends, enemies, lovers and so on. Evolving conflicts with our parents are the first we must attempt to resolve. Through family, we begin to learn about security/insecurity, dependence/self-reliance and the ability or struggle to love. In practical terms a resolution is never found; we harbor a delicate balance between reverence and disrespect and the patterns we create impact the rest of our lives. Exploring these patterns is a key focus in my life and art.
Photography has significance for me on several levels. Most importantly, my father was a photographer and I grew up surrounded by his images. These are my one tangible link to the man who died to early for me to really know. A photograph’s honesty is tenuous at best, its realism pretends to tell a truth and we often feel very comfortable believing what a photograph shows us.
With Papa Obscura I am pushing the boundaries of photographic manipulation. Using my father’s vintage negatives I have printed gelatin silver prints - reinterpreting his images to fabricate a new truth. Chronicle of Exile is a series of 4x5 still life images. Using props and photographs to create a collage, these images stand as a counter point to the work of my father. The objects and images within each photograph are metaphors for the complexities of the parent-child relationships and are often left undefined. These are very personal images that come from an intuitive process and as such they ultimately become self-portraits of the artist.