Sean Snyder

Sean Snyder presents a new series of photographic and video works, which experiment with technologically produced and processed images. For Optics. Compression. Propaganda, the artist selected an image of a raw optical glass from the Carl Zeiss factory archive in Jena, Germany. The photograph, produced between the First and Second World Wars, has been reproduced using the basic permutations of printing industry standards: as a photographic print, a magazine image, a newspaper image and as an internet jpeg. The work analyzes the implicit visual and technological vocabulary of image making and its dissemination. Snyder makes visually manifest what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan formulated in his Television (1973) interview: the question inherent in what we see is what remains yet invisible to us. Snyder explores ideas of accessibility, transparency and the limitation of what is visible, intrinsic to the resolution and compression of visual data, as well as overt montage and propaganda techniques.