beck haberstroh

The Year of Learning to Move in the Dark


I reperform analogue photo processes as a way to tangle contemporary issues of legibility, representation, and power. Here are some recent material experiments with the index in 3 different ongoing projects:

You Took My Impression Without Touching Me, thesis experiments with shadow play-

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Our faces are stored in corporate and government databases around the world. I’m working towards a thesis shadow play that explores our state of facial alienation under surveillance capitalism.

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I cast my friends’ faces to gather our impressions for a communal ‘database’ of facial belonging.

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AI-generated faces are transferred on top. 

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The generated face deforms to the real face. When is a deepfake a queerfake?

I’ve been experimenting with printing these faces in the dark room, circling the index. 


Our Body is the Limit of Our Image , photographic prints using human sweat- featured in essay by Dillon Chapman in HereIn https://www.hereinjournal.org/essays/dillon-chapman-on-beck-haberstroh 

In another series, I collect sweat in bed sheets or muslin binding and then coat the fabric with silver and leave it in the sun, replicating the 19th century photo technique of salt printing.

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I wonder what it would mean for photographs to be an index of sweat rather than an index of light.

What would we look like and how would we look? What is the labor of visibility, and where are we seen?

Our Body is the Limit of Our Image (with]1-72192092, me9-112192102, multipleunknown1242192102), 2022, human sweat, silver nitrate, bed sheets, box spring, bed frame, and light, 100 x 100 x 130 in.

Our Body is the Limit of Our Image (loop52192092pit), Our Body is the Limit of Our Image (loop52192092breastl), and Our Body is the Limit of Our Image (loop52192092breastr), all 2022, human sweat, silver nitrate, muslin, ceramic, and light, 6 x 4 x 2.5 in. each

Tigers and Angels, reperforming archives-

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In a different body of work, I reprint family archives using a flashlight. [video by Wren Gardiner]

I think about the choreography of viewing, how images make us and how we make images, and how I can reveal what is missing.

In the end, it is an excuse to be together. [photo by Maria Antonia Eguiarte]