TROPICAL INTERFERENCE

Scott MacLeay (2023) - 368 pages

Tropical Interference is a limited edition trilingual book (English, French and Portuguese) representing a comprehensive overview of MacLeay's new media work (digital photography & award-winning videos) created between 2010 and 2023. The book reveals the impact his move to Brazil had on his chromatic choices, his social perspectives and the evolution and development of his creative process. Speaking of his work during this period, MacLeay noted “In the early 2000s, I began working with digital imaging, and in 2009 I dedicated myself full-time to exploring the potential of this new medium to address intangible themes such as ambiguity, doubt, instability and vulnerability. The creative processes I began to research were inspired by those I had been exploring in my music in the 90s, processes that explored the notion of interference in a multitude of ways. My process became the content. To paraphrase Canadian philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan “the process became the message.”

Writing about the universe that MacLeay created, photographer and photography critic, Juan Esteves, states “Tropical Interference could not be more pertinent ... Macleay dismantles the established proposition of mainstream photography, distancing himself from the mannerist idea attributed to an image, regardless of its eventual pictorial nature and however strong it may be due to the aesthetics it promotes.”