| Most of my recent pictures are the size of either a page or a person. This is partly a result of the work’s sources (digital or printed documents and photographs) and subjects (human figures). It is also—and perhaps more importantly—a consequence of my technique, and by extension, of certain ideas about figures and figuration that I am slowly working through. To make my pictures, I first collect or generate a variety of photographic images. Then, I print the images as acetate negatives. The acetate negatives are then collaged together to create figurative images, usually either at the size of a single acetate sheet (8.5 by 11 inches) or at the actual size of the body represented. Finally, the negatives are contact printed using the antique photographic technology of cyanotype printing (literally, blueprinting). | 
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John Neff lives and works in Chicago, IL.
John Neff, Two Figure Studies, 2008. Cyanotype prints on siliconized paper, left: 10.5 x 7.5 inches, right: 11 x 5 inches. Courtesy of the artist.Most of my recent pictures are the size of either a page or a person. This is partly a result of the work’s sources (digital or printed documents and photographs) and subjects (human figures). It is also—and perhaps more importantly—a consequence of my technique, and by extension, of certain ideas about figures and figuration that I am slowly working through.
To make my pictures, I first collect or generate a variety of photographic images. Then, I print the images as acetate negatives. The acetate negatives are then collaged together to create figurative images, usually either at the size of a single acetate sheet (8.5 by 11 inches) or at the actual size of the body represented. Finally, the negatives are contact printed using the antique photographic technology of cyanotype printing (literally, blueprinting). In individual pictures, the effect of this process is a photographic surface that materially and visually integrates disparate sources while opening into a non-perspectival pictorial space that is unified but, stylistically, neither fantastic nor realist. My hope is that these pictures are able to generate—even if only for a moment—an empathetic relationship with their beholders, a relationship transacted over the surface of the pictures, but also within them.
The photographic negative has traditionally been seen as a locus of photographic truth—as original in every sense. With their evident processing—digital and printing artifacts, visible seams—my negatives work to sidestep such claims. Similarly, the rich and unpredictable materiality of the cyanotype printing process gives substance to digital images, typically imagined to be disembodied and perfectly replicable.
In addition to my work in photography, I am pursuing a practice of making three-dimensional representations of the human body. Like my cyanotype prints, these sculptures involve the gathering and joining of indexical traces, in this case plaster life casts. Taken from the same body or from multiple bodies over long periods of time, the casts—often intermixed with used and unused molds—are assembled into single sculptural figures.
This and other syntheses of fragment and whole in my work relate to my ongoing efforts to arrive at a figuration—an idea of the human—through which I might imagine the existence of integrated, singular subjects whose identities are not contingent on toxic and untenable conceptions of authenticity.
