Curtis Mann came to Columbia College Chicago as a photography graduate student in 2006. He quickly established himself as one of the most innovative users of the medium in the school. I was attracted to his physical abuse of the conventional print—with bleach and/or abrasion—because at the Museum of Contemporary Photography we have been working on an exhibition addressing the limits of photographic credibility. How little needs to remain to convince us? Curtis has taken this a bit further, wondering how we can accommodate so easily the radical scale shifts within photographic images. When he isolates figures of people, for example, they always seem way too small.
I guess I am also interested in this work because it qualifies the ongoing fear of digital manipulation and reminds us once again that photography is the most malleable of mediums to begin with. We don’t need no digital badges.
Curtis takes the perception based image back into the realm of painting and drawing and gives himself more wiggle room for arriving at conclusions that are both metaphoric and visual. He further distances himself from traditional notions of self expression by using other people’s exposures—in this current project they are photographs of Israel, which loads them with collective meaning. This allows him to explore our collective trust in the image as it disappears under his manipulation.
Rod Slemmons
Museum of Contemporary Photography
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