Through a disconcerting process, this jagged, and sometimes intentionally failed-looking use of Photoshop serves as a means of exposing and undermining the presence of such tools in commercial photography. While the clone stamp and other tools are often used commercially for retouching, Blalock uses them to create transparency about the images and how they are commonly produced. For Blalock, this parallels playwright Berthold Brecht’s ideas of the “Alienation Effect.” In many of his plays, Brecht used the theater to break down what he saw as distance between performers and audience members, inserted stage directions and traditionally hidden acting cues into the actual stage performances. Just as Brecht once made his stage directions transparent to his audience, Blalock now uses intentionally faulty editing techniques to expose photography’s digital process to his viewers.

Tenting, 2011 turns pieces of deflated balloons, newspaper and streamers into a strange, hovering, paper machete-like sculpture sitting dead center in the frame. While this new colorful beast may be the main focal point, studio objects the background of the photo clue the viewer into the photographic mechanics that are so central to his work. On one side, a rolled up studio backdrop sits in the corner of the room, while a studio reflector juts into the background on the right side of the frame. This is one of few images with a specific, literal reference to the photo studio as a part of the photographic process. They exist more as visual footnotes uncovering layers of digital and analog secrets.

In Rocking Chair, 2012 multiple negatives of a wicker chair are layered on top of one another, blurred, cloned and erased at random points with digital slices cut in certain areas. Perspective flattens into a two-dimensional sculpture that, despite its absolute and seemingly random chaos, feels somehow resolved. This carefully placed randomness feels like x ray goggles that Lucas has handed us as a lens for seeing the every day in a visionary new way.
img116, one of the subtlest images in Windows, Mirrors, Tabletops initially appears to be a straightforward photograph of a paint splotched highway underpass. At first glance, the image resembles a straight photograph of Rothko-inspired abstractions that often result when city officials attempt to cover up graffiti in public areas. At a closer look, it’s clear that these are actually quiet variations of Blalock’s pranks, which create both the illusion of paint on the walls, and an uncomfortable flattening of space. On the area where the overpass meets the ground, the remains of a clone stamp faintly appear, like fingerprints whispering “Lucas Wuz Here.”

As controversy continues to arise regarding overly airbrushed models in major fashion magazines, and Instagram tools have democratized retouching for the masses, it’s interesting to consider Blalock’s work as one that challenges, exposes, and plays with these mechanics. The title of his first and most straightforward book, I Believe You, Liar might actually be an unintentional precursor to the questions raised in his more recent work. Since the publication of Windows, Mirrors, Tabletops, largely in response to the immense popularity of Instagram filters that democratized the ability to “fuck with Photoshop,” Blalock’s work has taken a more direct turn. While still pulling apart the mediums deceptive seams, it’s no longer entirely reliant on playing with photography’s digital tools to make its commentary. “Before I was using the procedural steps in commercial picture making as a skeleton to hang things on,” says Blalock, “where now I feel like I am more likely to see it as trying to get closer to the sense of the thing pictured.”

Blalock’s consciously crude applications show the unavoidable artifice that may exist in all photographs, and reveals them as cheap and superficial. His specific subject matter is not central to his final photographs—whether they are landscapes, portraits, a bowl of fruit, random objects purchased at a dollar store. Even his straightforwardly jarring, flash-blasted images of hot dogs hinge on the process of controlled looking. Ultimately, it pulls the viewer from a fantastical, polished world, into one that wears its flaws on its sleeve.