30x35

'30x35' comes from a passport photo puncher's common sizing in millimeters. It is used here to fragment an archive to better match diminishing memories of 30 years ago and to form better connections with the past self in times of the infinite image.

The title '30x35' comes from an identity photo puncher's common sizing in millimetres.

Looking at innumerable discarded identity photographs in street markets, I was struck by how much information they contain despite their postage stamp dimensions. I then began to look at old photographs of mine that were too dilettantish to work as a whole, but which often contained elements of information worth conserving, however fragmentary they were.

A photo puncher was used almost counterintuitively to turn prints into archipelagic islands of distinct information and suggestion so as to better represent and conserve diminishing memories of 30 years ago from a period of great physical connectivity through relief, promise and inconsequentiality in the wake of the end of the Cold War.

Now, over a generation into the digital era of oversaturation and atomization of the self and one's world, ‘30x35’ is my archipelago of resistant finite memories. From a larger mass a scattered, though interconnected chain, is now brought into being. By eliminating the excessive or repetitive information in original prints, their punctum core(s) have been extracted to create an archipelagic archive as a new model of existences of the then-in-the-now.

The submitted sample 30x35mm punched prints are scanned for 1:1 reproduction. Here they are presented on an A4 ratio aspect, but could also sit as are on an A3(+) to further accentuate the isolated nature of the oceanic archipelago, separated due to natural disasters, time and amnesia. Always threatened by rising sea levels, but holding something unique and of something greater.

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