Lisa McCarty is a photographer based in Durham, North Carolina. She has participated in over 60 exhibitions and screenings at venues such as The Carnegie Museum of Art, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Chicago Photography Center, Houston Center for Photography, Griffin Museum of Photography, Asheville Art Museum, and the American University Museum. Additionally Lisa’s moving images have been screened at festivals such as the New York Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Experiments in Cinema, Cairo Video Festival in Egypt, Encounters Short Film & Animation Festival in the UK, and Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival in Scotland. Lisa received an MFA in Experimental & Documentary Arts from Duke University and is currently Curator of the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University’s Rubenstein Library as well as an instructor at the Center for Documentary Studies.
Experiments in Impossibility
Experiments in Impossibility is an ongoing project to test every type of Impossible Project instant film, the unstable successor to Polaroid. I began this project in 2010 and continue to use this new instant film with my SX-70 camera in order to test the parameters of the film and create a typology of light and emulsion. The film itself is highly volatile, changing in terms of light and temperature sensitivity as well as chemical make-up from batch to batch, rarely yielding predictable results. These properties are often understood as failures of the film. I assert however, that this film just records a different type of visual information that simply does not match what our eyes can see. Instead it extends our vision, rendering the invisible, visible, and reasserting the instability of photography.
To view more of Lisa’s work please visit her website.