Garie Waltzer: The States Project: Ohio | LENSCRATCH

Garie Waltzer’s personal evolution as a photographer in some ways mirrors the wildly radical transformation of the medium itself during the past 50 years. After working as a painter as an undergraduate student, she embraced analog photography; later, she described her relationship to the medium as being “infused with a love of process and materials” and her work as straddling “the boundaries of what was considered ‘photographic.’” Waltzer was an early adopter of digital imaging, working with scanners and Apple computers in the 1980s; she combined digital output from imaging machines intended for business applications with drawing and other expressive techniques to create large-scale color electrostatic collages. Her hybrid use of imaging technologies and painterly strategies continued throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s. But, just when, as she describes it, “the avalanche of digital work” revolutionized photography, Waltzer took a hiatus – and when she returned to photography, she came back to the analog world.