Steven Cook's Alternity

Alternity began about 5 years ago when I started collecting old photographs and carte de visites of people.
I'd be sifting through thousands of the things and every once in a while there would be a character who stood out from the rest - someone who wasn't looking stiff, uptight and scared of losing their soul to the camera.
They shone. Maybe they had an enticing smirk or twinkle in the eye. These were the photos I'd buy.

I began to wonder why people always looked as if they belonged to their own particular era and whether they'd look out of place in the 21st century wearing contemporary fashions.

As an experiment I started to scan the photos and swap bits around digitally. Things got especially interesting when I began scanning from my own negatives and dropping those into the melange.

It might be a shop front from Brooklyn; a heavily tattooed Betti Marenko; a photo I took of Andy Warhol; Canary Wharf underground station, or a backdrop from Rennes-le-Chateau in France.
I discovered that I was creating something completely new by sampling and re-mixing images in this way.

As the series developed, I noticed that the characters from the historic photographs were becoming more and more liberated. It seemed as if they were breaking out of their own repressed age and were starting to interact with the 21st century. Perhaps they were ahead of their time... or had they discovered fourth dimensional travel?

With Alternity I have created my own version of the past, resurrecting these people from their long forgotten existence, giving them their fifteen minutes of fame - posthumously."

Steven Cook, London 2002