Michael  E n s d o r f


				The images in the body of work titled Fiction
				begin by being digitized from books, maga-
				zines, and newspapers. The photographs are 
				chosen for their historical import as sign-
				posts to some of the significant events of 
				our time. These are the representations of 
				an era - the images selected for inclusion in 
				history books, the ones signifying memorable 
				events. These events seem so far removed 
				from my own personal sense of history that
				I question my belief in any mediated form of 
				imagery. Ultimately, the Fiction series
			
				
			
				
				
				
			
				
			
				
			
				represents the confrontation of this dis-
				belief. By removing these photos from their 
				original contexts, and by using a paint program 
				to add color and text in order to call atten-
				tion to the surface of the image, I hope to 
				question the validity of photography's author-
				ity to describe a time, or to define history. 
				The word "fiction" functions as a label to de-
				sensitize the original photograph, and in turn, 
				the actual event depicted. It references a 
				staged reality in some images, and the ques-
				tioning of a given event in others.

				Stemming from a need to investigate the col-
				lective non-identity of mostly anonymous 
				individuals depicted in the digitized media 
				imagery, the Minor Players series attempts 
			
				
			
				
			
				
			
				
			
				
			
				to lift and extract the participants from 
				the historical environments. These witnesses 
				go mostly unnoticed, and their identities will 
				most likely remain forever shrouded in mystery. 
				After working with specific images for so long, 
				a certain familiarity is born that begins to 
				develop into a fictional reading of their 
				subjects' identities. I feel I know these faces, 
				but in reality their closeness to me makes 
				them even more distant.
			
				process:
				The computer is used as a tool in my work. 
				After the newspaper and magazine images are 
				digitized and imported into a paint program, 
				I am allowed the freedom to extract areas of 
				an image at will. Faces are ñcutî from a
				scene and enlarged to fit into the respective 
				spaces of the individual grids. The amount of 
				pixelization that occurs is dependent upon the 
				size of the individual face in the original 
				photograph; the more distant the person, the
				bigger the pixel. The face-grids are then 
				tone in an image-processing program. 
				The files are output to slides via a film
				-recorder. For traditional exhibition use, 
				Cibachrome prints are then made from 
				the slides.
			
			
			

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