Four Eyes was designed, printed, and bound at the Artist Residency at Directangle Press in the White Mountains of New Hampshire in August 2023. The book features photographs taken by myself and my dear friend, photographer Hannah Volckmann, during a ‘photo road trip’ that we went on in California that summer.1
The process of creating this edition of forty-five 108-page fully Risograph-printed books involved designing each spread, separating the colors for inks specific to Directangle Press’s Risograph, printing three or four colors on each page, collating each book individually, binding, and cutting the books down to size. For this project, which experimented with faux-CMYK printing, I substituted magenta ink with fluorescent orange.2
I found that the result lent the printed book a compelling warm glow while staying true to the film photographs’ palette.
The book was designed to display where our perspectives aligned or diverged from one another, her photos on the left and mine on the right. I wanted to see how different our viewpoints (both literal and figurative) were while in the same places or doing the same activities. When two sets of eyes look at one subject, how do they see it? How do our photographs speak to the values of the person behind the camera and how do they influence each other? How can a collaborative project like this present photography as a practice in addition to focusing on the subjects being looked at and documented?
Hannah’s work centers on uncanny photography. For a long time, her photos consisted of bedroom scenes that were entirely built on a soundstage.3 She would fabricate fake rooms from scratch that featured elements that alluded to larger, unseen narratives.
I have been trying to replicate a similar feeling in my photography, but through a process of capturing organic moments in my everyday life that lean into the surreal. In my last few photo book projects, I have enjoyed incorporating photos of subjects separated from their contexts in the hopes that people will make their own assumptions about each.
This road trip consisted of stops to places that we were both drawn to because of their strange architecture or otherworldly aesthetics. These stops included a Scandinavian-themed mini golf course, a cave system, a one-third scale model of Sacramento (called “Safetyville”), two fairs, and a Mormon temple visitors center. The trip meandered from Oakland to Sacramento and back. In some ways this was a kind of homecoming, coincidentally mirroring the drive I would take to my hometown while I was in college.
The spaces we photographed vaguely look like the familiar, but this familiarity evaporates under the slightest bit of scrutiny. As modern city skylines are transformed by prefabricated, unadorned condo buildings, it is refreshing to visit a place where the point of its structures is fantastical representations, even if the illusion does not hold. These places speak to the intentionality of their builders, and the history of a place beyond what we can witness in the present moment.
The process of going to a series of places specifically to photograph them made me reflect on my position as a photographer and what it means to be in a place as an observer but not a participant. In my first year at Cranbrook, Chris Fraser, the Artist in Residence of the Photography Department, helped me realize that I had been thinking about photography as capturing some kind of objective reality rather than it being a product of my own hand.4 Maybe in capturing a moment you fundamentally change it.
During our days out, Hannah and I were constantly telling each other how jealous we were that the other person thought to capture something we did not, and how good we thought the other’s photos were going to turn out. The images and the method of their printing are meant to evoke the same kind of joy that went into capturing them.