In the piece 36 Exposures, I used 35mm film canisters discarded by my “Introduction to Photography” students as the metal base to hold their collodion tintype portraits. I employed this labor-intensive, 19th-century photographic process to make the students’ portraits on the very film canisters that played a crucial role in their initial understanding of photography. The entire series is housed in a mahogany display case, which I designed and built to reference and reinterpret the history of photographic display. The canisters and the process I used in this piece speak of my fascination with the evolving nature of photography, representation, and culture.
