Pentimento

This series of eight cyanotypes are an investigation into how time skews memory. By returning to locations of importance in my youth I wanted to investigate how the experience may provoke past memories to emerge, exposing present ones for their deficit. It is within this context of an older vision reappearing that I introduce the term pentimento. A word used in art to describe the reappearance in a painting of an original drawn or painted element which was eventually painted over by the artist.

After documentation and reflection of these spaces I set out to capture these discrepancies. To accomplish this I used Photoshop to create a sense of surrealism by mixing old photos I gathered with the new ones I shot on location. These final landscapes were then burned onto print paper using the cyanotype process and finished with a tannin bath. Though these memories are foreign to the viewer I hope these works still provoke a sense of a blurred reality and the erosion of time.