Art-Sheep Features: Amy Friend Gives Light To Vintage Found Photographs

Amy Friend is a Canadian photographer who experiments with her work’s concept, content and form in a creative and different way.

Most of her series stand as a memento of people, stories and experiences, while others document everyday moments. In Dare Alla Luce the artist focuses on photographs as objects and aims to explore their substance and definition. She uses found vintage photos which manipulates by embroidering them and letting light shine through their holes. This process gives an ethereal and other-dimensional feature to these photos, allowing them to have a character that suits their story and content more.

The series is a comment on the quality of the photographs, their fragility and their ability to capture a scene that exists only for once. And while the memory of a moment might soon fade away, the photographic memory never does. And though a photograph can never “forget”, it can be altered and re-made in a way that balances between the present and the absent. With a strong sense of irony in her work, Friend seems to use the light the way a camera does. As the maker of the work.

She brightly creates photographs through the light,as it is what actually transforms these punctured photos into works of art. This is why she chose the title Dare alla Luce, which in italian means “to bring to the light.” According to the photographer,“the photographs have new meaning, despite their unknown history. The title of each piece holds significance; some titles were taken directly from the notations found written on the photographs, yet those without any indication of provenance were titled to reference the nuances of photography as a medium. What we see is only a fragment of a much larger history.”

2015

2015