PHOTO SOUVENIRS

All Hand Pressed Souvenirs have photographic origins. Much like a photograph, each porcelain souvenir acts as a frame and document for a particular moment in time. The porcelain objects have the ability to act as a photographic negative, imprinting the original ‘positive’ forms into new materials and creating new composite images. The porcelain souvenir does, however, have a tactile advantage over the traditional photograph as it captures a direct and physical 1:1 record of a moment in time between people and place. The relationship between photography and clay is formalized with Photo Souvenirs, a sculptural object comprised of a collection subset and a custom-altered archival photo box. I created the first object in this series as a commission for the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.