Josh Brand

Having grown up with a darkroom in the basement of his family home, Josh Brand has always experimented with film and analogue manipulation techniques. After studying in photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, Brand was employed as a commercial printer in New York, where he was again able to use the darkroom facilities, after-hours, to conduct further experiments. Contrastingly, Brand employs the exacting processes of photographic development to create works that are abstracted and hold an element of randomness in their production. Despite their synonymity with photography, Brand’s fragmentary images are made without the use of a camera, and are purely the result of obstructing light from reaching certain areas of a photosensitive surface, using materials such as cardboard and paper. Brand’s work represents a return to analogue in order to re-examine and reinvent its properties, comparable to that of William Basinski’s sound works. ...