SURFACE TENSION
The initial idea for Surface Tension came midway through 2014, when I carelessly wrote something on a piece of paper resting on top of a photo; the writing left a faint impression on the print. After that I became interested in exploring the physical aspects of photographs, and how they could be incorporated as objects into photographic art. My initial interest was academic, I was approaching the work through photographic theory, semiotics, and ideas about geometric perspective and gestalt psychology.
How do we look at and understand photographic images as signs that represent the world 'out there'? Are photographs a window onto the world? How does the wandering gaze of the viewer interact with the fixed gaze of the camera? A photograph is what Vilem Flusser calls a technical image, an image created by an apparatus (such as a camera). The problem of technical images is that they do not seem to need to be decoded, that is, their significance (their representation) is automatically reflected on their surface. The significance is the cause of the signifier, or as Roland Barthes says, every photograph is somehow co-natural with its referent. The image is created by the object it represents, and so photographs are often taken to have a direct, indexical link to the spaces and objects photographed. It is for this reason that viewers try to see through the photograph, to the absence represented, to the world out there depicted in the image. But they are always aware (even subconsciously) of the flat surface, and there is a tension between this awareness and the desire to see the photograph as a window onto the world.
Over the last year and a half, my motivation for this work has changed, or at least my understanding of my motivation has become clearer. Photographs have now become post-industrial. They start out digital and stay that way; that is, they remain as pure information. With film, photographs were always tied to industrial production, in which the value of an object is inherent in the object itself. But the value of a photograph is in the information it holds on its surface: the image. If you remove the need for the print in the dissemination of that information, why print?
The shift of photographs from reluctant (but necessarily) industrial objects to post-industrial, the realm of pure information, has created a sort of existential crisis in photography. This seems to have led to a rising interest among (mostly younger) photographers (particularly those who have grown up with the internet and social media) in the photograph as a physical object, in the properties of the physical surface of the print and how that relates to and interacts with the image. But there is also a kind of insecurity that has developed in photographic art in the digital age.
It is no longer just enough to take a photo and print it, there is a sense that we need to justify taking the image out of the digital world and placing it into the physical one. To somehow reassert the hand of the artist in the object. I believe that this is ultimately the motivation behind my own current photographic practice
- Text for 2015 exhibition at Perth Centre for Photography.
