Harlan Crichton
MFA ’20 Photography
Where does rationality end and blind faith begin? This question has been on my mind since I came to understand the religion I was raised in, Scientology, is a cult. Twice a year, my family traveled to Florida and my parents would take expensive courses prescribed by the church. What those courses actually entail is still unclear to me, but believers are told that they will lead to some kind of nirvana. When I was young, it was just a part of life. It wasn’t until I left the church that I started to examine it more deeply. This body work began shortly thereafter.
My images are made on expired large format slide film and then double-exposed using a laser. Found objects are used to distort the beam and mask the film. The resulting image is a notion of a photograph, almost an abstract painting. The results are completely unpredictable, and the process becomes a form of play. The laser disrupts the background, obscuring the original image. I photograph places that are associated with conspiracy theories, trying to better understand the misinformation that I was taught as a kid. I have made images of the site of the 1947 incident in Roswell, NM and the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, TX.
Growing up in Scientology, I believed the church’s conspiracy theories. Scientology teaches, among other ideas, that psychiatric care is a harmful and evil practice, and the only way to improve oneself are the church’s extortionate courses. As a result, my mental health struggles were disregarded well into adulthood. Largely due to social media, conspiracies have become mainstream. Faith in them have led to reduced trust in scientific fact, to mass shootings and to the January 6 Capitol attack. I have made it difficult to understand my images, attempting to convey my own history with misinformation and disrupting the viewer’s ultimate perception. In the end, the veracity of these conspiracies matters little to me. I am much more concerned with the extremes that people are willing to go to, when blinded by faith.
Harlan Crichton was born in 1990 and was raised in a rural community of artists in Liberty, Maine. He graduated from Maine College of Art and Design (MECA&D)with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography in 2012. In 2020 Crichton graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a Masters of Fine Art (MassArt) in Photography. Crichton currently lives and works in Westbrook, Maine.
