Greg Sand
Echoes
19 September - 25 September 2020



“By giving me the absolute past of the pose… the photograph tells me death in the future… I shudder over a catastrophe which has already occurred.”

These words from Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida precisely describe how Greg Sand feels when he consider a photograph so old that the subject must be dead.

Greg’s response has a number of layers: he feels an immediate connection to the living person in the photograph, followed by a dread of what inevitably is to come for them, completed by a sense of grief over what has, of course, already transpired. This reaction is why his work utilizes found photographs, which he manipulates to create a narrative exploring mortality.

His work aims to question the nature of photographs and challenge the traditional definition of photography.

Echoes explores the struggle to retain a lucid remembrance of lost loved ones.

This series uses found photographs of people next to water in which the figures have been removed and the images have been inverted.

The subject becomes the reflection of the subject; the physical becomes the spiritual; the sky becomes the water, a symbol for transformation and change of state. What remains is an imperfect, distorted, and elusive memory.


Greg Sand (Clarksville, Tennessee, United States) is an artist who explores the issues of time and death. His work is about memory, the passage of time, mortality, and the photograph’s role in shaping our experience of loss.

For Greg, photography’s unique ability to capture a fleeting moment allows it to expose the temporality of life. He produces work that addresses the nature of photography and its role in defining reality.

Sand received his BFA in Photography from Austin Peay State University in 2008. He has received recognition from many jurors, including Chicago art dealer Catherine Edelman, Guggenheim Assistant Curator Ylinka Barotto, and acclaimed artists Shana and Robert ParkeHarrison. Sand currently produces work in Clarksville, Tennessee, and exhibits across the United States.