Howard Harris

Howard, in the works gathered in ICON, one encounters an insistence on the image as an unstable perceptual event rather than a fixed representation. Could you speak about how your layered constructions challenge the classical photographic index, and whether you see Techspressionism as a critique of the camera’s historical claim to objectivity?
When I speak of layered constructions, I mean images built from a photographed base that are then deliberately overlaid, remapped, or physically altered. The altered image enables a single fixed moment to present as an ongoing perceptual event. These procedures make visible the gap between a camera’s raw capture and the full, lived experience of seeing: memory, affect, display conditions, and allow individual perceptions to become part of the picture rather than the picture being just in the viewing background.