A photograph is undeniably something of reality. Whether it be a shadow captured in the making of a photogram or a snapshot taken on a family holiday, the photographic image is of something that was –– Fact. The reality captured is however transformed to something else – something new.
Formed from a matrix of silver grains, ink droplets, or pixels, the image exists with meaning in the minds and imagination of the viewer of a photograph. Each of us will see and interpret the image uniquely –– Fiction. A photograph is simultaneously fact and fiction, and in continuous flux between the two.
I am interested in how traces of our world fixed in an image connects with the cerebral construct of the photographic view. The synthesis of these two elements forms a new reality – a photographic reality that exists, perhaps, in a universe parallel to our own.
The Hidden Visible
2013 – current
Abstractions in knowledge, lost identity, distant science, nostalgia, and belief
Those Who Hear the Ticking
Uplands, Downlands, Sunlit Meadows... wish you were here
An exploration of the subjectiveness of photo-memory, responding to a political environment nostalgic for fictional, nebulous pasts.
The Children of Mars
Drawn from an archive of discarded negatives of children’s portraiture, surgical interventions complete the loss of identity severing the sitter’s connection with the past, transforming these to portraits of the present and future.
WE
A darkroom collaboration with developer and gravity, reanimate portraits from decades past to a new anonymous population.
Galactic Coordinates
Photographic fact and speculation collide through a found archive of cosmic imagery.
A place that was, and might be
2009 – 2013
Within landscapes that reveal and hide, places that undulate between have been and dreamt, situated in time that will not repeat.
Nylon Chrysalis
Architectural shrouds and scaffold appendages dot the landscapes of European city centres, and invade dreamland.
Coming Soon
Studies of nature under control and placed into order, within formal gardens and glass houses.
Coming Soon
Transits of latent vision
2003 – 2009
Explorations of photographic time, space, and imaging beyond what we can see.
Corndogs and Candy Apples
Distant memories of annual visits to amusement parks visualised through an assemblage of slow time through a pinhole.
Coming Soon
Coming Soon
Opera houses, palaces, rocket launch rings - a wonder world stretched through an anamorphic pinhole projection.
Coming Soon
Footprints
Visualisations of magical encounters of structures within the barren expanse of wilderness realised through impossible vistas formed on infrared film with the rotations of a circuit camera.
Coming Soon
Down in the Park
Coming Soon
Latest Transmissions
World Pinhole Week(?)
A couple of pinhole prints recently discovered in batch of old work. Produced at a workshop I conducted at the Summer Fotoschool in Liptovský Mikuláš Slovakia, 2009 or 2010. The paper negative was contact printed on a beautiful creamy textured FOMA paper from the...
Old Work, New Again
It seems to have become a tradition for me to miss World Pinhole Day. This year’s landed last Sunday. I was reminded of it as I was organising my studio and came across of a bundle of prints I hadn’t seen in a few years; Pinhole work that I produced about 10 years ago...
Urban destruction then / now
Diptych, 24 x 40”, gelatin silver print, unique . Printed from a series of 35mm negatives capturing the aftermath of the bombardment of a French city, possibly Mâcon, during the Second World War. I have the name Mâcon associated with the negatives, but am not...
Photo: Paul Heartfield, 2018
Born in 1969, William Mokrynski, is a visual artist who has been working with photography since he was a child. Through silver-based explorations and play on narrative, he considers photography’s intrinsic ability to connect us with the time and space presented in an image. In recent work, the anonymous vernacular camera negative is used to investigate interpretations of photographic reality.