Tina Leto

First and foremost, these images are documents. They are studio portraits of the objects taken out of their environmental context. I photograph using a dual lens scanner as a camera and treat the resulting images like a traditional photograph, i.e., burning, dodging and dust removal. My images are purely photographic and purely digital yet obscure the transition between the familiar and the new.

Secondly, it suggests to me that converging on a line that separates the fantastic and the factual lies a kind of visual poetics. It’s very easy to be lured by the sheer color of a plant but beyond that, there is structure, architecture, and an order to the physicality of each specimen. The transformation of the ordinary weed to something sublime is what I seek to express in the monochromatic photograph.