Joyce Campbell Philosophy of images
In her 2002 series ‘L.A. Bloom’, made while living in Los Angeles, Joyce Campbell obliquely interrogates the politics of water availability and poverty through thirty-two Ilfachrome photographs. Swabbing plants from a broad range of Los Angeles neighbourhoods, Campbell cultured these swabs to produce bacterial growths from which she made direct contact prints. The resulting body of images, at first glance an experiment in photographic abstraction, instead function as a material transcription of place.
The organic processes used to create these images allowed the organic world to assert its own presence, mapping the relative bacterial health of a city in which water is a contested and
