ABOUT:

Anthony is a high school photography, graphic design, and illustration teacher, and a member of the Edge Contemporary Art Gallery.  He graduated from the University of Colorado Denver with a BFA in Illustration and attained K-12 Art Education Licensure at Metropolitan State University of Denver.  When he is not teaching, you may find Anthony operating a 100-year-old camera, making alternative process photographic prints, or conducting digital wizardry in Photoshop.  His work blends the historical with the contemporary (both in concept and process).

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ARTIST STATEMENT

My work consists of photographs of constructed paradoxical scenes and visual illusions, challenging the viewer's perception of reality and certainty.  The work forces a confrontation between photography's legacy as a document of truth and the contemporary reality of digital manipulation and fictitious imagery.

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My artistic practice is rooted in the rich history of chemical photography, specifically the wet plate collodion process. Upon photography’s inception, people saw the medium as representing absolute truth — a direct chemical imprint of reality.  The wet plate collodion process is rich with distortions, bubbles, and streaks—chemical artifacts that serve as markers of authenticity and evidence of a direct process rooted in chemistry and physics.

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In creating my work, I use contemporary digital manipulation techniques and miniature construction to build these surreal or impossible scenes. The resulting constructed image is then photographed using the wet plate collodion process, a crucial final step that introduces the chemical artifacts, texture, and physical markers of an authentic, truthful photograph. High-resolution scans are taken of the final photographs to create large-scale prints for a gallery setting.