Kent Modglin

I grew up in Cambria, Illinois, a town of about 500 people. Because we almost never 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 a mechanism I've developed to mold the world into something more worthy of our attention.

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 the woods on Tiger Mountain in Washington.