Raymond St Arnaud

This was a return to a theme I had explored 20 years earlier. Like many such early works, it was short lived, as it lacked direction or sense of purpose. The concept was retained and lay dormant, waiting for a different sensibility on my part to explore this theme again. Images were collected during 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. The first images were collected using a film camera. I began photographing with a digital camera in 2005. I decided to terminate the series in 2006. I had other images that were now of higher priority, other themes and other technical ideas that required exploration. The title for the series and the individual images come from a connection to an economic viewpoint on the development of our society through the 20th century. Specifically the phrase "the Henry Ford economy". This relates to the creation of a middle class through the development of mass production techniques that made many goods plentiful and affordable. It was said that Henry Ford believed he had to pay his workers well enough so they could afford a lifestyle that would allow them to buy one of the cars they helped build. The Reflections, of course, come from our own century. They are often obscure and subtle, sometimes a bit clearer, but always distorted; much like our view and understanding of what it would have been like to live in the "Henry Ford economy". The hard copy images are printed on art paper using a digital printer. Color, 120 photographs, 134 pages.

I have to confess that at various points in my life I was addicted to TV, Television. It consumed huge blocks of my life, with little to show for the experience. I occassinaly carried this addiction into my art endeavours. It was a way of confronting the rabbit eared monster. The first of these images grew out of my explorations of image manipulation which I published as "Outside the Box". Those images were deliberately altered to echo the look of traditional print making techniques. "As Seen On TV" evolved into its own series and subsequent book. I applied various means to effect the illusions of images broken up into a series of lines. The lines were also manipulated to represent various cultural representations of what TV line resolution looked like. There is no scientific accuracy here, just arbitrary interpretation. The books has one full image and one detail mage to give the viewer a better sense of the content. Color, 26 images presented as; 13 full images, 13 detail images, 40 pages