“It felt like a discovery for me—and I liked the idea of a kind of cyclical studio process where the object and subject get conflated.” Erin O’Keefe discusses a photograph from her series, “The Flatness.”

© Erin O’Keefe. The Flatness #11, 2013, Inkjet print on matte rag paper.
Image courtesy of the artist.

This photograph is from a recent body of work titled The Flatness. The series exploits the tendency of the camera to flatten space. When I began this series, I was interested in whether I could make images where the inserted photograph appears more dimensional than the actual still life space it occupies.

This particular image is a still life of painted boards and a letter sized photograph. My photography practice is studio based, and it is often driven by the stuff that happens to be stored there – objects and images left from previous projects. I often arrive there with a plan for the day, only to be sent in another direction entirely by something I see. The painted boards used in this image, and in the series generally, were left over from a previous project.

“It felt like a discovery for me—and I liked the idea of a kind of cyclical studio process where the object and subject get conflated.”

My studio routine usually involves shooting at the studio during the day, and looking at work and printing some test prints at home in the evening. I often bring these test prints back into the studio the following day as a reference, a reminder of what I was thinking about. When I took this image, I remember feeling very frustrated—completely out of possibilities. I was working with a limited set of materials, and I felt as though I had reached the end of what they could offer. On a whim, I grabbed a print from the previous day’s shoot and slid it into the set up I was shooting. There was this alignment between the photo and the still life that I could not have planned it if I tried. It felt like a discovery for me – and I liked the idea of a kind of cyclical studio process where the object and subject get conflated. It is an idea I have returned to often in subsequent work.

—Erin O’Keefe

Erin O’Keefe is a visual artist and architect based in New York City. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Cornell University, and a Masters of Architecture from Columbia University. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in the US and abroad. Most recently, her photographs were included in the “2014 Photography Issue” of Vice Magazine and Humble Arts Foundation’s “31 Women in Art Photography.” She was selected as one of Photo District News’ “30 Photographers to Watch for 2015.”

View more of Erin’s work at her website.