Technical Images of Flux
2017 - ongoing
Overview
This project challenges the assumption that photographs are objective records of the world 'out there' and explores their capacity to document scenes and tableaux created by the act of photographing them.
Description
This project challenges the assumption that photographs are objective records of the world out there - and explores their capacity to document scenes and tableaux created by the act of photographing them.
Prompted in part by:
- Flusser's (1983) observation that the popular conception of photographs “leads whoever looks at them to see them, not as images [in their own right] - but as windows” onto the world 'out there',
- Arbus's (1972) observation that “You don't put into a photograph what's going to come out. Or what comes out is not what you put in” and,
- Winogrand's (1973) observations that “The photograph isn't what was photographed, it's something else; I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed”,
This project has evolved through three distinct phases:
In the first phase of the project (Submarines), the camera was held above the sea, pointing down towards a human figure below the surface who had agreed to undergo the ordeal of posing for me.
In the second phase, the positions were reversed. A waterproof camera was held just below the surface of the sea, pointing upwards towards faces and torsos of willing subjects standing above the surface.
In the third phase, the waterproof camera is held just below the surface of the sea, pointing upward through the surface, thereby using the water of the Mediterranean and Cretan Seas as a lens.
In both the second and third phases of the project:
- The appearance of the scenes and elements are in constant flux, changing and distorted by the properties of the water and by their reflection in the underside of the surface of the sea.
- The photographs are made using a simple digital camera which imposes a delay between the moment I push the button and the moment that the image is recorded.
- I do not look in - because I am unable even to see - the image in the camera's viewfinder.
These three constraints therefore prevent me from being able to intentionally select or determine:
- the specific elements included in the photograph,
- their juxtaposition relative to one another,
- their arrangement (composition) within the frame, and
- the precise moment at which the photograph was made and the effect of all of the above at that moment. The resulting photograph is therefore an active (or, an act of) collaboration between me, the medium (whose technology determines how the elements are rendered) and chance.
This notion - that photography can, under certain conditions, document scenes which were created by the act of photographing them - is explored in detail in my article Is This Photograph Taken? published in the Journal of Visual Arts Practice.
Please note:
The results are all 'straight' photographs. In some cases, I have increased the brightness or contrast or cropped the images (adjustments comparable to those made in a traditional photographic darkroom) or 'spotted out' bubbles - but have not otherwise manipulated or 'Photoshopped' the results.