Touch, 2010
type-c print on metallic paper

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Empire (no. 1), 2010
ink and pasted paper on paper

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Z is for Marilyn (b), 2011
ink and gouache on paper with pasted paper

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Carbon, 2010
type-c print on metallic paper

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–, 2010
type-c print on metallic paper

all images courtesy the artist and Marc Foxx, Los Angeles

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CARTER MULL has long used photography as a tool to explore the social and political conditions of our visual culture. Investigating the materials and processes of the medium itself, his work blends an enduring fascination to our digital era with its endless vernacular proliferation of images.

Whether he creates installations, drawings, collages, sculptures and videos, MULL utilises the photographic image as an intrinsic material. Employing both digital and analog techniques, the resulting work bursts with lush color and vibrating patterns.

The processes vary from photograph to photograph: some are darkroom procedures, some employ the customary tools of mass photo production to different ends, and some are a combination of both. There is this distinction made between digital and analog photography. Questions surrounding the obsolescence of one means of production seem to be resolved well by artists older than myself. For me, these distinctions between different generations of technology are real concerns—but more important to me is a sense of the material life of an image. This is a question not of tearing or scratching photo paper, but of bringing the material life of an image into proximity with the viewer. – CARTER MULL in conversation with EVA RESPINI

CARTER MULL‘s works have been included in several surveys of contemporary photography, such as the 2009 edition of New Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and are in the permanent collections at UCLA’s Hammer Museum, MOCA and the Whitney Museum