I grew up in Cambria, Illinois, a village located in an arean known as Little Egypt. At that time, Cambria had a population of 500. Because we rarely ventured outside of Cambria, I grew up believing that people everywhere were as peculiar and fascinating as my neighbors. I was deeply disappointed when I left home for college and discovered that elsewhere, people were merely ordinary. To compensate for this disappointment, I rejected the common reality others seemed willing to accept, and in its place, I substituted one of my own making.

I manipulate antique photographs and other images until the story they tell has transformed from the ordinary into something more elaborate, more hyperbolic. It’s sort of like writing fiction, visually. It’s the mechanism I’ve developed to make the characters, who once lived only in my head, live in the world at large.

And, if you are going to the trouble of making up a story, why tell a little story when you can just as easily tell a whopper? For instance, why tell a simple little tale of two brothers who grew up in mid-America and led conventional lives, when you can just as easily tell a tale of two staunchly religious, nineteenth-century brothers who, while on their way to church, were swept from the American Great Plains by a cyclone?

But the truth (the real, unmanipulated truth) is that the story I create isn’t what is important to me. I want to encourage the viewer to create a story of their own, to use my images as a point of departure for creating a story of a life never actually lived.

I have a BA from Southern Illinois University, and an MFA from Columbia College, in Chicago. I live in Seattle, Washington.

kent modglin digital artist angels vintage antique pphotograph