Christine Zuercher is a photographer born and raised in Dayton, Ohio. She exhibits work nationally, is a 2010 Dayton Art Institute Yeck Fellow and a 2013 Ohio Arts Council Excellence Award Recipient. She has most recently shown work at the Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas, and the Bridge Gallery at the University of Georgia. She is currently working on her MFA in photography at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina
Greenville, North Carolina is home to the last government owned shortwave radio station in the United States. Struck by the solitude and meditation of a location created to transmit thousands of dots, dashes, beeps, and sounds through the air a second, the silence present at each location is astonishing. I am photographing a part of our history that is being forgotten. Through photographing, I am recapturing a means of historical technology and communication that is still significant but is being silenced by progress.
My research on shortwave radio encompasses various forms of correspondence including stamps, telegrams, maps, shortwave shipping forecasts, spy codes, and a growing collection of the QSL cards that shortwave operators send to each other. QSL means, “Do you confirm receipt of my transmission?” This and other language used in shortwave technology is rooted in the idea of distance. DX, a common abbreviation for shortwave radio actually means “distance”. I layer my own images of shortwave stations with the QSL cards I have been collecting using a transfer process called Super Sauce. In a way each card is a map or the pointing to a place or a conversation from the past that has disappeared without the card, similar to the fading frequencies of shortwave spy codes and transmissions.
To view more of Christine’s work, please visit her website.