Sean Snyder presents a new series of photographic and video works, which
experiment with technologically produced and processed images. For
Optics. Compression. Propaganda, the artist selected an image of a raw
optical glass from the Carl Zeiss factory archive in Jena, Germany. The
photograph, produced between the First and Second World Wars, has been
reproduced using the basic permutations of printing industry standards:
as a photographic print, a magazine image, a newspaper image and as
an internet jpeg. The work analyzes the implicit visual and technological
vocabulary of image making and its dissemination.
Snyder makes visually manifest what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan
formulated in his Television (1973) interview: the question inherent in
what we see is what remains yet invisible to us. Snyder explores ideas of
accessibility, transparency and the limitation of what is visible, intrinsic to
the resolution and compression of visual data, as well as overt montage
and propaganda techniques.
