Photo-Based Artist Amanda Marchand is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of these images. From the series ‘Re: Touch, the Arithmetics of Distance, 2020-present ’. To see Amanda’s body of work, click on any photograph.

While moving studios several years ago, some experiments with ink on film were filed, then forgotten in the shuffle. In February 2020 I found them in an envelope and, curious to see them for the first time, sent them to be scanned.

I got the images back mid-March, one day after NYC schools closed for pandemic safety, as alarming numbers of sick and dying were rolling in. Part of my fascination with this project has been with the strange alchemy of creativity itself – how something you begin can sit patiently, like a seed, until the right moment.

I use antique photo retouching inks and old slides from my personal photo archive. These inks traditionally erase flaws that occur in analog photography—to create a ‘perfect’ print. The inks interact serendipitously with the landscape, as stains, blotches, floating vessels, imaginary interventions, each suggesting different relationships to the land; political, environmental, formal, and corporeal.

Artist Statement

I am a photo-based artist. My work takes an experimental approach to photography, while exploring the natural world and our changing climate. The theme of time is central to my work - as all photographs reveal not only what is present in the frame, but what is now absent, in the past.  I experiment with photography as a medium that is versatile and evolving, engaging with its history and plasticity - through analogue, digital and camera-less photography.

All images and text © Amanda Marchand