Cole Peters
Sound & visual artist

Photography is an inherently referential medium — that is, it depicts something other than itself. As a means to record fragments of space and time, it is typically intended to present the viewer with reproductions of discernable reality, from which further information or meaning may be drawn.

What does a photograph become when it is stripped of this intention? This body of work is one response to this question. It is ultimately an exploration of surfaces, presented on their own terms. In this sense, the resulting images both embody and contradict photography’s origins and intents — each subject is accurately depicted, and yet appears anonymous, ambiguous, perhaps even devoid of form.

All images were captured on medium format black and white film and scanned in high resolution to enable large-scale printing, with only minimal tonal adjustments and cropping applied to the final images.