Date of Submission
Fall 2012
Academic Program
Photography
Project Advisor 1
John Pilson
Abstract/Artist's Statement
Blacked Out 2012
Blacked Out refers to the practice of redacting portions of text by concealing them with black marker. Blacked Out is a loss of electric power, a halt in communication. It is censorship. It is an altered mental state. Blacked Out describes the action of covering or painting over windows so they cannot be seen through.
Information is intentionally hidden, and things can be understood only through fragments left unchanged. Just as some piece of a document lies hidden below a thin layer of ink, the full meaning and context of these photographs remains slightly out of reach. When truths are concealed, fictions that remain are allowed to become truths and the border between the two becomes blurred. These images exist in that strange interstitial space, an area somewhere between this world and some other.
This is a place shrouded in foreboding, but it is unclear whether something bad is about to happen, has just happened, or is happening now. Real danger sits just out of sight. These images are fragments of some story—an alternate history, a possible future, a jumbled narrative of fear, an incomplete survey of some unknown threat.
-Reuben Mills
Distribution Options
Access restricted to On-Campus only
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Mills, Reuben, "Blacked Out" (2012). Senior Projects Fall 2012. 27.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_f2012/27
This work is protected by a Creative Commons license. Any use not permitted under that license is prohibited.
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