Bittersweet is a photographic project concerned with the experiences of looking, seeing, and (visual) memory. It begins by adopting the forests of the Pawtuxet River and environs as a series of visual problems. Because of their sheer overgrown complexity, these settings are neither immediately nor completely amenable to visual analysis. Any real-time experience of them will necessarily be incomplete and any subsequent visual memory highly impressionistic. In such cases, the distance between seer and seen begins as great and continues to grow over time.

The photographic apparatus provides one possible means whereby the viewer can begin to address the visual problems of the forest. The difference begins as soon as the camera is introduced to the setting and continues through shooting, processing, printing, and post-production. The photographer goes into the field armed with a framing device--a guide for looking--experiencing the world as an image projected onto a focusing screen. He begins to relate to his environment as a series of possible exposures, a manner of seeing that continues when the camera is set aside. The framing device gives rise to a sort of empowerment which culminates in an aestheticization of experience--one rooted in the photographer's ability to organize and compartmentalize his environment. The visual strategies of organization, reification, and aestheticization are in no way unique to the medium of photography. What is, however, is the mechanical precision and visual literalness of the information inherited by the photographic negative.

Subsequent stages provide further opportunities to edit, re-frame, and re-imagine. The process is one of continued abstraction. As direct memories of the shooting experience fade, the photograph becomes a mnemonic device. Eventually, the photographer's only (or at least, strongest) connections are to the images and not the experiences wherein they were produced. Insofar as the images are tied to a linear ordering scheme--i.e., rolls of film further organized by when they were shot--they retain some of the character of an objective narrative. As soon as this order is relinquished, however, other methods of organization (or lack thereof) may take hold.

These basic facts about the nature of the photographic undertaking serve as raw materials for Bittersweet. The project began with a simple fascination with the complexity and visual impenetrability of the Rhode Island forest--the degree to which it embodied challenges for seeing and experiential memory. In short, the forest was attractive in large part because it was so alienating, alien, and sublime. Furthermore, shooting was often conducted in conditions which amplified the disconnect between viewer and setting--i.e., at night (necessitating long exposures, sometimes on the order of 40 minutes or more) and after extended and disorienting treks into the woods.

For months I shot and processed continuously. As the images accumulated I began to realize I wasn't solving the "problem" of the forest but instead creating a parallel set of problems in images, the very accumulation of which had created an orthogonal dimension of formal complication. Inherent in any photographic undertaking is the impulse towards some manner of formal organization and the production of a unified body of work. Two things became clear: how much of a challenge this would be--given the subject matter and volume of the images--and how bound up this other framing device was with the production of a formal narrative--that is, one which potentially told the story of the images but not of the things and settings which they depicted.

These problems gave rise to a kind of sorting "game" which lies at the center of one portion of Bittersweet. Medium-format (6x7 cm) negatives were contact printed, mounted, and then re-accumulated in a random manner. This process produced a set of images from which the linear constraints of the film roll had been removed. These images were subsequently arranged to form the groupings present at the exhibition. These groupings were produced without reference to the original orderings, and any determination as to whether two images had come from the same roll or location was made on the basis of visual memory alone. In some cases, it was easy to conclude that two images had originated in the same place; in others the opposite was true. However, in the end every grouping was accepted or rejected primarily on the basis of my own formal intuitions. In some cases, this ruled out groupings of "actually" related images in favor of images depicting disjoint spaces; in some cases the consequences of the formal determination remained obscure. The images are presented as linearly reconstituted.

Contact printing--a method of image production which makes no critical use of an enlarger or lens--is the most direct means of transferring the information stored on the acetate negative to paper. It creates tiny images which, because of their small scale, are in a sense "thumbnails," yet which, because of their utter fidelity (i.e., they contain as much information as a mural-sized print of the same negative if not more because the latter relies on the mediating presence of a lens for its production), are complete images which invite close scrutiny. To carry the analogy a bit further, the "thumbnail" is perceived only at a distance. When approached, the full image becomes perceptible.

In this way, the contact print sets up a dynamic between viewer and image which is rooted in their relative separation and which evokes the aforementioned dynamics of progressive visual, experiential, and mnemonic alienation. A similar but inverted dynamic is set up with the large xerox piece, an enlargement of an image also found in the exhibition as a contact print. As the viewer passes the exhibition space, a portion of the mural-sized xerox is seen through the doorway on the opposite wall. Because of the xerox's scale, the doorway is activated as an interactive framing device. Entering the exhibition space, the viewer steps through the looking glass and into a panoramic image field. As he approaches the image, however, it breaks down into abstraction, compounded by the relative infidelity of the xerox technology and in marked contrast to the "perfect" fidelity of the contact print. The nature of this push and pull is in one sense analogous to the experience of the photographer. Photography presents one possibility for relating to complex visual environments. As a visual strategy, it implies an acceptance of the mechanically produced image (approach--echoed with the small pieces) but carries with it an implication that the most comfortable acts of looking occur at the distance of a somehow-mediated representation. Here, the aestheticization of experience means it must be framed and in some sense imagined.