Jenny Owens

In many ways In the Background is a continuation of The Back Room as it also focuses on fragments but this time the fragments that have been turned into new images were taken from films made in the early eighties by my grandfather and other people who used his camera. The films were first converted into DVDs and then into a digital file. From these I took screenshots of moments that caught my attention due to their colours, their compositions or their narrative possibilities. In each image I go directly to the essential information, often in the background of the image, and cut it out. Afterwards, I photograph these fragments with a digital camera and print them on paper. All the technological components are important in this process of transferring images from the past to the present. The images do not arrive to the present without changes or without traces of their journey, for example, their colour is modified with the digitalization, and again when they are photographed and once again when they are printed. Their texture and form also change. These changes convert the old images into new images. I think the fact that the camera was passed between many different hands in the original film gives the images a certain universal quality. This allows the viewer to create their own stories and also reflect on their own memories and on the construction and reconstruction of them.