“I don’t want to say ‘I do this’ – I don’t even feel entirely comfortable using the ‘A’-word; saying I’m an artist.”

The figure of a woman, shrouded, head slightly bent, holding… something: a basket, a water-jug, the Christ child perhaps, merely, a bulbous white glow. Even as this untitled image breaks into nothingness, fragmenting like an exploding star or the vision of a decaying retina, it retains an iconographic essence of woman-ness; a faint glow peeking through the ether, radiating from millions of pictures we’ve seen hanging on the wall before.

This is Jamie Gruzska’s milieu – a world of images we all-but-know, decayed to their illogical ends. In the photographs of Pittsburgh-based artist and educator, Gruzska, every subject is a ghost, every print a Turin shroud. He understands what defence attorneys ponder with eyewitnesses; that memory is always myth, and that our vision, like our language itself, is merely capturing outlines for us to fill in.

A lecturer and lead photography instructor at Carnegie Mellon University’s prestigious School of Art, Gruzska has been an integral part of Pittsburgh’s art world for more than two decades, since returning from the late-eighties New York City art hype. Yet his relationship to the medium – like his work itself – is muddled. Gruzska shuns most commerce-based art involvement, rarely seeks out opportunities to show, even shies away from the mantle his student’s don.

“I want to be able to practise all kinds of un-disciplines” says Gruzska. “I don’t want to say ‘I do this’ – I don’t even feel entirely comfortable using the ‘A’-word; saying I’m an artist.”

Of course, he is an artist and has been for quite a while. Gruzska’s contribution to the 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial included images made last year and images from his youth in the 1970s. But thanks to Gruzska’s interest in obfuscation, it’s difficult to tell which are retouched shoebox discoveries and which are brand-new. The darkened negative spaces and pinhole views reveal more about the photographer than the subject every time.

In his most recent work, Gruzska has taken disintegration to a new level. His latest images begin digitally. (‘I like the fact that I can just use a phone,’ he says, ‘but I bought myself a Leica figuring, even if I don’t like the camera, I won’t mind being seen carrying it!’) The digital images Gruzska takes – of people, the interiors of rooms, and of existing images from the Hirshhorn Museum and National Gallery – are printed onto the reverse side of photographic paper. Things fall apart; the ink cannot hold, and the artist makes prints of that dissolving image.

“I’m into archetypical images,” says Gruzska, “things you look at and say, ‘Oh, that’s a portrait.’ People say, ‘why are you doing this outmoded presentation, you should be doing installation that has lighting and robots and sound!’ But, you’re missing out on the huge currency of a picture on the wall. And, at the same time, they’re unique, because every minute the original image is dissolving.”

And there lies the crux that keeps Jamie Gruzska moving forward; the search for a medium that is always replicable and unique, pictorial and centre-less. In his work is the honesty of the obscured – an image of that which we’re absolutely certain we do not know.

“That honesty is the best tool one can develop as a growing artist,” says Gruzska. “Somehow these tools, photography, painting, whatever medium, can be diagnostic programmes we can run on ourselves to figure out who we are.”