White Lies

White Lies

Presented by Jake Lovins


Photographers sometimes consider themselves collectors. We collect moments and light in order to tell a piece of a story. I wanted to go a bit further and be a collector of the collected. I wanted to act as a curator for a collection of forgotten works. While my name is attached to White Lies, this project is not really mine.


Though disjointed and hopping between generations, these images act as a visual poem of adventure, loss, complacency, and nostalgia. Part of the curating process for me was to include images from abandoned rolls of film as well as my own collection of forgotten negatives and give them a purpose. I expect an audience to be indifferent to the visual ambiguity of these images. I expect that this body of work will have some bored, but hope that it will make others question the hold they have over their possessions and creations. The diplomatic white lie we often tell ourselves is that we own anything. That we can put our name on something and call it ours is not completely true. 

The overarching tone of this project calls me back to my first photography project ever, which consisted of claustrophobic black and white vertical nightscapes from the Summer of 2007. I've been absent from photography for 5 years and felt that I needed to complete the circle in order to finally move forward.

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