The Memory Grid is a collection of mostly anonymous faces created with the help of digital imaging software. The individual faces were extracted from digitized media imagery, advertising pictures, and family snapshots, and manipulated in various ways using Adobe Photoshop on a Macintosh, in order to investigate the nature of photographic, as well as ocular vision. The individual faces/files were output directly, via a syquest disk, to a Canon Color Laser copier and mounted individually on gator board by the artist. Combining the personal with the political is an attempt to understand and convey the elusive nature of photographic representation. Just what can a photograph tell us about the past and the present? What information is relevant? What part of the photographic process is a construction of the maker, and what part the subject's? What visual information is required for a viewer to make a positive ID, to trigger a memory, to spark a connection? Memory, identity, and visuality are the driving forces within the Memory Grid project

Michael Ensdorf, Assistant Professor of Communication at Roosevelt University. Master of Fine Arts, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1989. Recently, Michael Ensdorf had his work exhibited in the Photography after Photography exhibition at museums in Germany, Austria, Denmark, Switzerland, Finland, and at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and in the archives of the Digital Imaging Forum at www.art.uh.edu/dif.