Kodachromes (2025– )
Kodachromes is an ongoing series of figurative paintings drawn from images published in National Geographic Magazine. I focus on photographs produced through Kodachrome, an Eastman Kodak color-film process synonymous with the magazine’s iconic visual identity. These images are saturated with a specific chromatic intensity—almost like advertisements for Kodak itself— that now carry a mnemonic charge, evoking both the material history of print culture and the obsolescence of analog technologies.
When reproduced on the page, these photographs already hover on the threshold of painting: their tonal richness, formal composition, and staged clarity blur the line between journalistic record and aesthetic artifact. My work pushes this ambiguity further, re-rendering them in paint to question their truth claims.
At stake is the mythology of National Geographic, whose authority as a window onto the world has long rested on the supposed neutrality of the photographic image. Yet every photograph is constructed—framed, staged, and colored by the techniques of the observer and the apparatus of the camera. By translating these images into painting, Kodachromes exposes this mediation. It asks what happens when a medium that insists on truth is folded into one that foregrounds artifice, and how memory itself is colored—literally and figuratively—by the technologies of vision.
In this sense, the series also speaks to Susan Sontag’s reflections in On Photography, where she revisits Plato’s allegory of the cave to argue that photographs are not transparent windows onto reality but shadows—mediated projections that shape how we understand the world. The glossy surfaces of National Geographic promised immediacy and access, yet what they delivered were carefully staged images filtered through cultural and institutional frameworks. By re-painting these Kodachromes, I stage a second mediation, drawing attention not to what is shown but to how it is shown—how images, like shadows on the cave wall, construct myths of truth, beauty, and otherness that continue to define collective memory.