John Manno

Some photographs begin with a camera. These begin with scissors, light, and a kind of quiet obsession. The images in Misbegotten Places are dioramas — hand-constructed scenes built from other photographs — then re-photographed into new existence. The result is something that resists easy categorization: not quite collage, not quite sculpture, not quite straight photography, but borrowing uneasily from all three. Each piece occupies its own strange territory, drawn from subjects with no obvious connection to one another except the sensibility that made them. They are images that couldn't have been found in the world — only built, then discovered.