It's surprising that even still we regard pictures as being discrete little rectangles of visual experience, which to certain extent of course they are, but the more fundamental problem is with how narrow our conception of photographic reality so often is, habitually confused with mere resemblance and not the multiple, discontinuous overlay of memory and presence we actually live. Gerald Slota's work is inherently photographic, it conjures an interior reality from the materials themselves, in this case old negatives bought at an estate sale. Something about it reminds me of Roger Ballen, which might seem a bit unlikely given how different this is in terms of both style and execution, but the knowing primitivism of his "drawing" on the negatives, the brittle, fevered intensity of the resulting images, suggests something of the same private world Ballen works with, a haunted psychological landscape, albeit one arising from the "lost time" of the photographs and how he works them. A large selection of Slota's work can be found on his website.
