Artist Statement
Corrie McCluskey is a Bay Area b&w medium format photographer who shoots fine art and social documentary projects, ruins and urban landscapes, and occasional portraiture. Her images have been published in the New York Times Magazine, Camerawork, Photovision, Shots, Foto Pozytyw (Poland) and Focus (Netherlands) and exhibited in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and elsewhere in the US, as well as in Germany (Mannheim) and the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Naarden, Enschede, Groningen).
Trained in anthropology, McCluskey’s photographs have become her field notes; she explores themes of “place” as repository of memory and as cultural artifact, the passage of time, looking at the forbidden and forgotten with their unwanted histories. Her method is site specific, focusing on buildings & warehouses, prisons, train stations, cityscapes, graffiti and architectural details, using ambient light and manually operated cameras (Hasselblad and Holga). She is interested in how objects and environments can resonate with traces of people who have touched them, leaving a subtle feeling of life—or perhaps the residue of past life, left behind like an empty skin.
Process Statement
Corrie shoots mostly in medium format (6x6 and 6x7) and currently find herself drawn to both Hasselblad and Holga. She prints in editions of 25, on 11x14 warmtone Ilford fiber paper and archivally tone with selenium. Recently she's begun a kind of hybrid process: shooting in film, then scanning the negatives and printing with archival inkjet. And, she's designing her first artist books, printing digitally and/or with alternative photographic processes, and handbinding them.