Alexandra Opie

ECHO

Our experience of self and others is shaped by recording media in fundamental ways that often go unrecognized. A century or two from now, our images will inevitably record new variations of an individual’s presence in space and time. Here, in tintype photographs, aspects of early portrait photography are examined in the present. Posing for Nineteenth-Century portraits required a sustained encounter with the camera, replicated here as contemporary people take on the appearance of those in antique images. Over them, drawings of nineteenth-century dresses hover in superimposition—either as double exposure or in-camera mask—an echo of the past that captures a distinct change in how we occupy space.

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