the victor stamp project
The Victor Stamp project is a ludic mashup/remix/recycling of artifacts of photographic history that produces something we might call post-photography, re-photography, de-photography: you name it.
Theoretical and often quaintly “literary” in their initial impetus but decorative in execution — a retinal conceptualism designed to please both Marcel Duchamp and your average interior decorator — the works are like tiny candles on the icing of the cake celebrating the end of the photographic era, the demise of photography as the dominant means of representation and the guarantee of authenticity, a melancholy last hurrah for the iconic image and the age of mechanical-digital reproduction before the cryptological foundations of the new ontological era assert themselves, an era in which the token minted on the blockchain signals the new parallel reality.
The Victor Stamp works are sometimes made with a camera (generally an out-of-date cellphone, certainly nothing too fancy) but more often than not without: scanning is elevated to the rank
of a fine art, along with other varieties of machine photography (microphotography and the photobooth); vintage vernacular photography is repurposed; cyanotypes, Polaroids and glass and 35mm slides are intervened and diverted from the path of righteousness; and Photoshop is employed not just as a post-production tool for enhancing cheekbones and removing ideologically deviant Party members but as a medium in itself.
The classic Victor Stamp image enacts an alchemical roundtrip: an analog artifact is replicated, manipulated and mutated into a digital archive ready to be once again transformed back into an analog object, i.e. a material image (a “picture”) destined to furnish the pretentious sterility of the white-walled gallery or the hideous promiscuity of the modern domestic interior, a place where — to quote a not-so-recent IKEA catalogue —”Mickey Mouse rubs shoulders with Marcel Proust, and where Erica Jong shares space with Pippi Longstockings, Dostoyevsky and a plastic dinosaur.”