A selection of work from Detroit-based photographer Daniel Ribar (previously featured here). Ribar is currently pursuing an MFA focused on photography at Cranbrook Academy of Art and has been interrogating the way he thinks about photography in an effort to break old habits and patterns. While Ribar has always been interested in the idea of working with found images, he started to think about what the term means and what it might mean to treat his own work as such. The images in “Roman Candle” are tight crops made from wider photos from a clothing campaign Ribar shot that involved roman candles. With the models cropped out, the images were inverted as an ironic way of approaching them, literally, from the other side:
“I was intrigued by the painterly-like quality the images began to take on by inverting them. The grain, pixelization, and other digital failings also started to interest me as well — I saw these things as visual evidence of the fact that these images were cropped in and made as an afterthought, I wasn’t intending to hide that but rather lean into it. I think heavy cropping has been something I’ve felt ashamed of in the past — not seeing the frame in the moment and relying on post-editing to find it. This project was a way of approaching past thoughts head-on and challenging my ways of operation.”
Check out more images from “Roman Candle” below!
