Annie
Claflin
Bio
Annie Claflin
Annie Claflin (b. 1978, Boston, Massachusetts) is an artist living in San Diego, California who makes photographs, alters them, and creates photographic objects. Her creative practice provides sanctuary amidst psychological unrest arising from the main themes examined in her artwork: family, home, and their relationship to identity. Claflin graduated from New England School of Photography, holds a BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art + Design (garnering the award for Media Arts during her matriculation), and an MS in Arts Administration from Boston University. Her artwork has been published in Analog Forever Magazine and The Boston Globe and included in exhibitions at Chung 24 Gallery, The Griffin Museum of Photography, The Los Angeles Center of Photography, and The Whatcom Museum, among others. In 2023 and 2024, Claflin was included in the Critical Mass Top 200, and was a finalist in the Royal Photographic Society’s International Photographic Exhibition 165 in 2023. Her photograph was juried as third place award winner at the American Photographic Artists San Diego’s Untitled 2022 exhibition. One of her images placed as a finalist for The Kuala Lumpur Photo Awards in 2021. She was interviewed about her practice for The Boston Metro newspaper and the Too Tired Project online.
Pieces
Number of items found:
28
Artist's Statement
These are a lens-based series of photographic prints and photo-based objects that describe an ecotone—a transition area where the land meets the sea. While I photograph the San Diego coast, I remember forty years of sea level rise consumed the East Coast that I once knew. I submerge pigment prints and capture the surface of the picture moving off of the paper with my camera. This process underscores the temporality of an image and the transience of the shoreline. The resulting archival pigment prints depict warped photographs of the 2021 San Diego beach, as if they were floating in the ocean. As rectangular images morph into organic shapes, they transform from factual documents into large-scale memories, framed in white, and hung on the wall. I boil additional pigment prints from the same digital files in salt water to distress them, emulating weather and time. I memorialize these battered relics by mounting them on sand, salt, and resin (mimicking water), and sometimes frame them in black, cradled wood panels. Some of these works hang on the wall while others line a wooden walkway on the ground to mimic treasures found at your feet during a beach walk. These small artifacts, discovered and memorialized after the end of the familiar world, allude to a dark future, billions of years from now, when the rising tides ebb. While the framed prints assuage my anxiety about the homescape I will lose, the objects are keepsakes. I am intrigued by photography’s role in identifying and cementing the factual and fictitious topographies of my homescapes. I, too, am an ecotone and share my fears of losing the space I most identify with in hopes that others begin to lament the impending loss of our present day coasts.