Recent photographs 2002-5
Imagine a completely black photograph. What would it be a photograph of? One can imagine that perhaps, the photograph was overexposed or that it was a close-up of a matt-black object or maybe a shot in a closed up room. To our vision, it means no light and hence no form. Purely metaphorically, one might be witnessing blindness or a state of mind, before light, before one opens one’s eyes. The fragility that is our vision, our engagement with the world around us, is something that is easily forgotten. Can this black photograph remind us of this state? Maybe only if we are prompted to think that way. Blackness is not easily found in the waking visual world. What we often call black is a relative state and not black at all. Painters have charcoal black or conte black or lamp black- cold or warm blacks. Black objects by day, even in low light, pick up local colour or have a subtle reflective ness enough to make out their form. In photography, especially digital photography, we have the peculiar possibility of printing white through all the tonal range to absolute black. This black, as we do not live in an a priori world, is a theoretical black, as clearly, as soon as something is printed in the real world it has the same qualities as any other black object. On the computer and less so in the darkroom, one can choose black as a reference point. In other words, the image can be skewed so that the darkest parts of an image print in this theoretical absolute black.Metaphorically, opening a can of black paint might be read as a fall from grace into the world of light! The Garden of Eden and Pandora’s box have the same meaning as this unopened can of black paint. Similarly, that completely black photograph might read as The Fall as it’s now in the real world but it represents the world before light.
Our duality of vision
This world before light is something we carry around with us all the time. Because we are reflective beings, we see the world and daydream at the same time. We focus our attention on something; we look, and reflect on what we see. As often as not, we daydream, where our attention is inward and our visual world falls out of focus. It is not possible to stop this process and our very freedom as sentient beings relies on this state of affairs. In making a photograph, is it enough to say, “ I have taken this photo of so and so” and rely on it to be a complete picture of a moment? The photo must include this element of freedom, the inner view, the state before light, as well as my directed gaze.
The viewfinder and the centre point
When we look and direct our attention we necessarily centre what calls for our attention. (We often get told off if we don’t or we’re not trusted). This centring is natural to us but in an indeterminate world where everything is as important as everything else (visually speaking, not socially) this leaves much out. By obscuring or marking the centre we are made much more aware of the image’s relationship to it. The pupil of the eye of the photographer lies at that point too, so a direct visual relationship is set up between himself and the viewer of the image. It feels as though the viewer is somehow in the photographer’s skin, a rather uncomfortable and claustrophobic situation to be in. This is peculiar to photography; this continuous line of vision is unique because of the way the camera is used and the resulting print, if un-edited, represents the image in the viewfinder.
By using the black dot at the centre, one has in one image, the line of vision, the pupil of the photographer and the absolute blackness of the inner world before light. One can see in some of the new work that I am consciously trying to lose the dot within other black areas of the image. When I first started making these images, the blackness had more of a sense of untouched territory, something like virgin forest. Our collective culture has spent much of the last 10,000 years clearing the dark forest and lightening it, making in the process a modulated landscape of light and dark. This untouched black forest world is synonymous with the absolute black I mentioned earlier. The balance of light and dark found in our landscapes today reflect the cultural importance we place on untouched territory and by extension, human freedom of thought. The more we lighten, the more we resist the idea of letting things be. This visual (and cultural) battle is something I’m trying to realise in the photographic images.
The photograph: a window on the world?
Recently I’ve been wondering about how photographs are presented to us. If one looks through other optical instruments, a camera obscura, a telescope, a microscope, or even a simple magnifying glass one is immediately struck by the fact that one is looking at a circular image. They are all constructed out of tubular material. Actually, if one looks at a camera, one notices that the arrangement of lenses is tubular and should therefore result much like the eye itself, in a circular field of view. Instead the image is edited in the body of the camera into a rectangular field. It is an historical accident that we have ended up that way. From the earliest ‘photographic’ contact prints, paper had always been rectangular. The camera bodies first made were wooden boxes with a lens on one side and not metal tubes. However, even with this arrangement, one should still have a circular field of view projected onto a rectangle of paper, as with a pinhole camera. Why were early prints presented as rectangles? I think it was because at the time, photography was philosophically related to drawing. Fox-Talbot’s ‘A Pencil of Nature’ drew on the idea of nature herself creating the image and we, through the agency of chemistry (or alchemy) had found a way of her revealing herself. Drawings and paintings are windows on the world because there is no intervening technology between the artist and the view re-presented. The frame stands for the window. The painting sits in the frame and the artist presents it as if it is a view. The view must be recreated from a point of view for it’s plastic space to work convincingly. When an artist makes a painting of objects that are smaller than the real thing, one assumes it is because he is some distance away from them and not because he is painting them small!
But is a photograph a window on the world? It is used that way and photographers, for the most part, pretend it is. The problem lays in the technology of photography, the way the image is formed in the camera and the physical nature of the final print. The camera, digital or otherwise reduces the size of the ‘view’ much as the eye does using a lens with a specific focal length so that the view can be focussed onto a light sensitive area of material. Here is the first problem: the intervention of film. The camera obscura creates a view that maybe viewed as a window on the world. A projection onto a plane that is then viewed directly makes it into a window. The film’s latent image makes it into the definition I’ve set out. Once processed, projected onto paper (of whatever size) and processed again, the image cannot stand for a window but rather it is a graphic image very much related to other reprographic images; postcards, printed posters, type on a page, engravings or lithographs. If one views photographic prints in this way then all the hang- ups which photographers and especially galleries have about the look of prints largely disappear! Resolution, the sharpness of the image, the gradation of tone across the print are not that important unless the artist chooses to make them so and makes those qualities part of the meaning of the work. In themselves, they are conventions very much related to the window on the world idea- crystal clear, clean smooth glass, no blemishes and rectangular framing- conventions chosen to add value to an otherwise cheap product and to distinguish them from the snapshot, god forbid! If one prints onto a hand made paper or a material with texture one soon realises that resolution depends not only on the molecular ‘grain’ or pixel dimension but as importantly on the roughness of the printing paper.
Subject matter and meaning
Much of the language of photography relies on this physical resolving of the image. To print on rough paper means surrendering some of the major conventions on which photographers rely. One has surrendered the ‘photo’ to the ‘graphic’ by losing the ‘window-ness’ of the image. It looks as though the photograph is trying to look like something else, so strong is the convention we have been used to. Photographers have in reality got used to, for better or worse, industrial standardisation of tools and materials. Those few photographers who choose to make their own light sensitive paper have, to some extent, gone back to the first principles of photography and regained their individual freedom of expression in the making of the image. Those photographers who output their images via inkjet (giclee) printing have always had the choice, subject to the limitations of an industrially standardised printer. Does it matter? It does, if choice matters. If part of the meaning bound up with physical objects and images relies on the artist choosing it to be one way rather than another then clearly it matters a great deal. This freedom of choice is a cultural as well as an artistic choice. If I say,” I am a photographer, therefore I have only these commercial products to choose from”, I am making a cultural choice and a knowingly limited one. If I say,” I am an artist and the cultural and artistic meaning of my work relies on using such and such a material whether commercial or home made”, then I have made a knowing choice based on the knowledge that the material used has a meaning distinct from but related to the meaning of the image. This tension between form and content is largely lost when photographers pretend the photograph has no object ness.
New work
Although all the photographs to an extent look back to the drawings for inspiration, the new black and white images go one step further and make the visual leap of abandoning colour altogether, so the meanings derived from the drawings are more coherent and hopefully, apparent. The new images emerge from blackness so all black areas within the image relate directly to it or put simply, are the same thing. The images are circular, reminding the viewer of their origin through a lens system. The images are part of a process of returning to ‘graphicness’ whilst retaining the digital system of input and output. This is not without problems and philosophical contradictions, as the process would naturally seem to return to the pinhole camera! In practice however, as long as the frame selection and more importantly, its centre, are unedited, the images work as graphic representations of the meanings I’ve set out above.
A new tack I’ve taken recently (September 2004) is to take some of the ideas of illusion and object ness and try and make photographs into actual recognisable objects. The photographic paper after printing is cut and folded using the opened out card of packaging boxes as a template. Once re-made into a box, the photograph takes on a meaning related to the advertising and packaging of products and pushes the image into more poetic territory. Importantly, the image encloses and seals up the space within, something which the photograph is supposed to do when flat. The space within now has its own meaning related to that black untouched space used in previous work.
The photograph as object
When faced with an old print one senses it as an object as much, if not more than, an image of reality. I find now that if one pretends the photograph has no ‘object-ness’ it loses some of its reality and meaning. The slickness of a lot of modern photography seems to deny this most basic of realities. I’ve now been seduced by cheap photo graphics as seen on packaging as it operates as a version of reality, admittedly quite often to sell its contents, with images relating to those contents but also to realities other than itself, aspirations, desires and dreams. What if one made a photograph into a package? What would be ones image of its contents? Like the black dot, one is forced into a kind of reverie in a struggle to get to grips with an unknown space.
Waldsterben(lit.forest death) is of the Struhof concentration camp in France, a very loaded image to start with. The proposition has raised some eyebrows already because of the marrying of a 'heavy' image with a lightweight throwaway object. My intention was never to belittle the enormity of the context of the image but to create a genuinely difficult object to categorise. Its contents are not viewable so the image in a way stands for that which cannot be seen directly. The camp is set in a stunningly beautiful landscape in the Alsace but hidden within a forest with one road leading to it. It is as hidden as you could make it. In a way, it's a kind of memorial to somewhere that leads nowhere, a visual and an actual dead end. I'm not 'selling' Nazism as a product nor commenting on the Holocaust 'industry'. What gives the image tension and meaning is the fact of its throwaway-ness; it runs counter to its existence as a piece of Art whilst the subject makes it impossible to throw away without feeling something deeply taboo.
Amrit Row
September 2005
