PEELED

Some discoveries arrive as accidents. They begin in failure, in curiosity, in the unpredictable moment when a material resists and reveals something unexpected. Peeled was born from such a moment. The Polaroid company told me in 2004, I was the first to attempt this process with their Time Zero film, and to this day, the only artist to have done so. That kind of accident, an unrepeatable convergence of chemistry, timing, and intuition became the foundation for this series.

What inspired this series was not photography in the traditional sense, but painting. I had stumbled upon a way to make a polaroid feel like a canvas, to treat light-sensitive film as if it were pigment. The results resembled something almost archaeological, as though I were carving images out of hundreds of painted layers, exposing buried portraits beneath the surface. It is both photographic and painterly, but more importantly, it lives in the in-between, in the space where one medium disguises itself as another.

The process itself is equal parts precision and surrender. After taking a portrait, I etch into the film, inscribing lines and forms like a painter might sketch into wet plaster. Then, while the image is still halfway through its development, I peel apart the front and back of the Polaroid. To leave the film exposed to air, to let it dry unfinished, is to embrace imperfection and chaos as collaborators. The photograph is no longer fixed in certainty; it is vulnerable, unstable, in flux.

What emerges is never entirely within my control. I think of these works as weathered frescoes, as relics unearthed from walls that have held centuries of life. They carry a sense of erosion, of surfaces worn down by time and touch. Each portrait becomes less about the individual captured and more about the layers of gesture, accident, and material history embedded in the image itself.

For me, Peeled is the closest I have come to bridging my inner painter with my outer photographer. The camera provides the foundation, but the act of peeling, of disturbing, of breaking open, transforms it. It becomes a collaboration between the chemistry of the film, the hand that intervenes, and the chance that lingers in every tear and drying edge. The result is not a photograph in the conventional sense but something else entirely, a hybrid form, a scarred surface, a painting made of light and fracture.

In this series, I am less concerned with perfection than with honesty. The honesty of impermanence, of fragility, of processes that decay even as they reveal. Peeled is about what happens when you let go of control and let the medium speak back. It is about allowing the accident to become the artwork, about seeing beauty in what resists order. 

Limited edition prints available upon request.