Found Image Paintings
Found Image Painting 20 ‘Neujahr 1937/38’ oil on canvas 122 x 173 cm 2011
I have been working with found photographic images since 2005. These are individual or groups of photographs, negatives, slides, TV and film stills and home movies that I have collected from a variety of sources including flea markets, second-hand shops, libraries, friends and ebay. They may be spontaneous looking snaps, photos compiled into albums or carefully annotated and filed in a commercial or institutional archive. I have no means of preselecting the images, which are usually discovered in a disordered or arbitrary context. The availability of material is irregular and as such I have been working on the series intermittently whilst engaged on other projects using my own photographs.
The images are selected on a number of bases, sometimes because they depict historical events or periods of political tension, at other times for the light they shed on a particular social milieu, and in all cases for the evidence they provide about the ideologies, codes and conventions that generate and form visual practices.
The source material is transcribed using techniques drawn from the history of painting in order to produce a hybrid of the languages of both painting and photography. Dozens of close-up details are generated by computer and these are employed in a working process that entails no cropping, editing or distortion of the source image or the use of any other technical aids in the execution of the work. Wherever possible the paintings are titled in accordance with inscriptions on the reverse side of the photograph and where an archive has been used, there may be multiple works in a series.
Found Image Painting 24 ‘French Photographic Studio’ oil on canvas 122 x 163 cm 2011
Found Image Painting 28 ‘Couple’ oil on canvas 152 x 107 cm 2013
Found Image Painting 30 ‘Hans and Hinga at Bad Freienwalde September 1933′ oil on canvas 153 x 205 cm 2015
David Gledhill Painting History 