Zelda Zinn

LA Revelations

2013 - 2014
This series started in my suburban Santa Monica neighborhood, where I walked around and documented domestic plantings and the ordinary 1940’s style homes.

The name Revelations is meant to evoke ideas of “unveiling” as well as “revealing”: peeling back the layers of information found in traditional photographs to invite a long second look. Playing with questions of legibility and illegibility, the images evoke the aesthetic of camouflage and disruption, resisting any straight-forward closure of meaning. Through digital elimination of swatches of information, these images become more universal, while retaining the specificity of the actual time and place at which they were shot.

By stripping away colors and visual information, I reduce the images to basic compositional elements such as line and color, bringing out unexpected resonances in the everyday. As with my other work, Revelations questions how photography does or does not capture the Real. Presenting images with fragmented information invites the viewer to engage with the empty spaces, and the photograph’s skeletal remains prompt them to look carefully and to try to reconstruct what could be or might have been there.