Eileen Mueller
From her series Kunstbabys and Thin Ghosts:
"My work engages historic modes of photographing with the aim of reviving the magic of the latent image. In a post- Becher world I find myself reacting against the aesthetic artifacts of objectivity and dead pan photography that have robbed contemporary photography of the wonder and mysticism that were at one time unique to its photochemical qualities.
Through rephotographing vernacular snapshots, my work participates in a conversation about the history of the photograph as a widely used ritual object. By using my familial archive as source material, my photographs subvert the aesthetics of copystand and evidentiary modes of cataloguing in order to unpack the memorial aspects of the photograph. Through highlighting the surface and objecthood of optical prints, I conjure lost notions of photography as a medium for the metaphysical. More recently, my photographs have extended my engagement with photographic history beyond the bounds of the personal archive. I am reapproaching the expressive potential of technical imagery by manipulating the interpretive components inherent to the apparatus. The optical-mechanical system of the camera has long been debunked as a wholly objective indexical device. I delve deeper into the subjective and phantasmagoric potential of the mediated image by utilizing aberattions like the internal reflections of an uncoated lens in a way that reignites the magical elements of optics."
