Taking a wild guess, you probably have more than 539 images in your camera roll right now. Try to imagine that each of your photos is on a 5x7 inch plate of glass. Where would you store them? How long would they last? Who would study them a century from now?

In the early 20th century, Valerious Bruce Washburn, a photographer from Good Hope, West Virginia, captured people and landscapes using a view camera. Before film became accessible, these cameras produced a negative exposure on glass plates (see photo). It is assumed that he did this for a couple of decades before his house burned along with his photo equipment. 

Fifty years later, my grandfather owned a photography studio in the same West Virginia county. In 1992, he acquired 539 glass plates found at a construction site.

This show contains a mere 33 portraits found among Mr. Washburn’s collection. 

The collection remained in my family for over thirty years before my father digitized the photographs and donated all of them to the West Virginia Regional History Center. 

Last year, I began studying the digital photographs, searching for threads of connection. A decorative wicker chair appeared in hundreds of photographs and certain faces were repeated in various scenes. Combing through the fragments, its hard not to imagine decades of movement between shots and the relationships between individuals.

My art practice is primarily dedicated to uncovering a visual language of absence and light. Attending to absence draws out a presence. Though we know nothing about the threads between these frames, the mere collection itself is binding.