JM

The Keep in Touch Project

The Keep in Touch Project uses existing visual ideas – the snapshot, social media, mail art, and double exposure photography – to create both a material and procedural embodiment of the high school yearbook promise to “Keep in Touch”.

Twelve participants, people who greatly influenced my career, received packages containing the following items:  a letter explaining the project and its procedures, a return mailing envelope, and a disposable camera. They were instructed to take pictures of whatever they wanted, so long as the photographs were things they would like to share with me. They were told that nothing was too mundane or too inflammatory. When they were finished, their cameras were returned to me using the enclosed mailing envelope.

They were also told that I had already taken photos of my own using the cameras they had received. However, rather than being developed, the film had been rewound within the cameras before being sent to them.  Thus, every photograph taken by the project's participants would produce a double exposed print – the first exposure from my life, the second from the recipient.

As a result, the project shows the trace of two discrete actions, moments, experiences, and people, co-occurring in a single instant, a single image, a single frame. Through the project, we manage to fulfill a promise we may have forgotten to uphold – in our photos, our lives touch. And, though separate in both time and place, in these frames that distance is forgotten.

We may have grown up and grown apart, but in these moments we've

kept in touch.

 

project website

 

film photography – installation – interactive media – mail art – packaging – print design – web

 

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All content © Copyright Jane McDonough, 2016.