Discards — Jason Contangelo

Discards (began 2020) is an ongoing body of work originating from a studio practice of forming collages from the test strips, misprints, and otherwise discarded images produced within my analog photographic processes.

Lacan famously defined the ‘objet petit-a’ as that which is leftover following the introduction of the symbolic into the real. In the sense in which photographic processes form this process, transforming the real into the symbolic and back again into a real object of symbolic meaning (the scene into the negative into the print), one can analyze the photographic process itself on psychoanalytic grounds. These collages are made with, essentially, bits of pieces of objet petit-a that were leftover from my photographic processes. These are the discards, the subconscious remains of what is fundamentally a meditative psychoanalytic process of self-reflection.

This practice originated after some time absent from my studio due to the onset of the pandemic in 2020. What had been forgotten, discarded, had now found time to gestate, and when I saw these pieces strewn about with new eyes, their significance when pieced together became clear. These are the unexpected, unintentional, undesired remnants of the ego’s desire for order in a world of chaos. These careless little scraps of gelatin silver and chromogenic prints are the quite literal surplus produced from the desire of art-making. Pieced together as collages, and together here in facsimile form as a book, they are the embodiment of a surplus of jouissance—a transgression of conscious intent and photographic convention altogether.

The title of the work, “Discards,” refers both to their literal nature as discarded materials, but also to this sense in which the surplus of meaning is left over from the pursuit of desire, from the pursuit of new meaning. The discards, I’ve found, create new meaning when contextualized together. The work itself comes to form the object-embodiment of this missing surplus of desire to some degree, functioning itself as a sort of super-ego to the bodies of work from which the discards originate.

All 8”x10” analog photographs dry mounted on matboard. Various years, 2020-2023.