Traditional black-and-white photography is grounded in the principle that photographic truth is only revealed through the darkroom process where prints are submerged in baths of organic chemicals. Working exclusively in grayscale, Margo Wolowiec’s two double-paneled pieces re-approximate the experience of darkroom photography in the conversion between the digital image and her physical weaving.
Wolowiec has sourced images that attempt to replicate traditional modes of black and white photography in a digital space. Using the hashtag #blackandwhite as an archival tool to find the images that comprise her works, each digital photographsourced is an inexact representation of true black and white images. Wolowiec’s weavings interrogate the perceptive qualities of color and the artifice of online imagery. As her process involves conversions of images from RGB to CMYK color profiles the resulting range in palette simulating the absence of color reveals the imprecise nature of translated digitalinformation.
