CORPUS: Exploring the Power of the Physical Photograph

Not so many years ago, people stopped touching photographs. While print media and brick-and-mortar galleries exist, the common, everyday experience with photographs has drastically shifted from handling prints to scrolling through digital images on a screen. These photographs are easily created, manipulated, and shared, but at a cultural level the sense of intimacy and preciousness that comes with holding an image has been lost.

CORPUS reminds us that a photograph exists in the world, accumulating the history that sticks to all things that take up space. It aims to investigate photographs that re-engage the body, acknowledge their place in the physical world, and explore the impacts of choice of surface, volume, texture, material, and presentation methods on the experience of the image itself. CORPUS examines the photograph that does not turn off.