Joe Matty

MFA | Photography

ARTIST BIO

I am a photographer from Pittsburgh, PA, focused on the exploration and application of historical photographic processes. Drawing from 19th-century photographic practices, my most recent photographs are created as documents that explore virtual worlds we inhabit in video games. By using the process of wet-plate collodion, I create a physical object representing these non-existent places. Feeling tied to the documents that the photographs in particular created, I Was drawn to historical processes as a method to create a vision of the past in a contemporary environment, through which he is able to explore both his family and how the world around me has been shaped.

ARTIST STATEMENT

In this work, I explore the ways in which the world of video games acts as a method of escape into inhabitable alternate worlds. I photograph scenes from video games using 19th century processes, such as wet plate collodion, in order to recontextualize these digital, non-physical scenes into a physical photograph. For many of us, the digital worlds we imaginatively inhabit feel real. These photographs function to make those worlds materially tangible, which allows the viewer to feel unencumbered by disbelief.

My work is about an escape from the difficulties of life. With the photographic processes I use and the games I play, everything works in tandem as an attempt to escape to a different time, somewhere I’d rather be than here and now, but that has never really existed. To me it is a survey of these worlds, something I view as a literal extension of my own reality. Photography itself has always been about the creation of a world for me, about creating documents of a world I see through my eyes or one that I imagine.