All the work on show has been generated from an area in rural Monmouthshire where Sear lives and has situated her studio. While this can be considered a factor that unites the art works, it would be reductive to consider Sear’s work as primarily ‘about’ place, locale or even those complex and conflicting ideas and emotions stirred by the term ‘home’. Rather, the work is a manifestation of Sear’s attention to her own lived experience to the everyday. The particular place where Sear lives and works provides the material that Sear engages with, that she pays attention to, but it is an attention that is marked by a playful and intelligent irreverence.

The verb ‘to lure’ is also used in falconry to name the action of the falconer to entice a hawk or falcon from the air which fittingly, is also the title of a short video piece by Sear: Lure (2012, 13 mins 38 sec). The footage depicts a disparate group of visitors to Bwlch Nant yr Arian Forest Centre, near Abersytwyth, to watch the arrival of Red Kites who are regularly lured to the area with the promise of a free meal. The camera, however, points towards the visitors, with no indication as to whether these iconic birds of prey arrived or not. Instead, the video becomes a tableau vivant of frustrated expectation; the group of people have been drawn indeed lured to this place by a promise of a spectacular view. The orientation of Sear’s camera helps us understand the event is a conflation of a particularly modern notion of the rural as a place for leisure, the place to encounter the wild, a place to stand in front of, to enjoy looking at. Sear implicates us within an intersecting network of looks that frustrates our assumptions of what is the object of our gaze, disrupting the expected and therefore challenging our perceptions. In this deceptively simple video then is a metaphor for Sear’s work that plays with what we see and what we think we know.

Sightlines (2011) is a series of portraits from an earlier foray into the complexity of interactions involved in ‘looking.’ The work is a series of portraits of young women whose faces are positioned behind cheap, mass-produced figurines of birds. As the background to each image is hand painted with gesso, a wash made of ground marble, this throws the image as an object into relief; the lifeless yet piercing eye of the painted bird confronts our gaze. This creates a strong sense that these ceramic birds have intervened in order to protect the ‘image’ of each woman from the gender or sexual politics of looking. Importantly just as each woman in each picture is a unique individual, she is also accompanied with and protected by a different ceramic bird. In a dual action then, there is a refusal to allow the women in the photograph to become the object of our gaze, while also challenging the figurines’ assumed lowly status as a cheap mass-produced commodity, unworthy of prolonged attention.

The deliberate frustration of an expected view of a rural landscape forms the conceptual basis for the impressively scaled Blocked Field (2012). The key to this image is derived from the depiction of a dog in the foreground; it seems to be a breed of gun dog that resonates with the tradition of representing the rural landscape as a picturesque playground for the landed gentry, the usual patrons for such images that also functioned as symbols of their ownership of the land. However, the epic and almost monumental scale of the stacked hay bales blocks the anticipated, clichéd view of picturesque landscape, refusing to generate a nostalgic fantasy of owning and belonging. In this work, Sear is following on from the practice in 19th Century for artists to represent the countryside as a place of work, exemplified by the paintings of Jean-François Millet and the photographs of P. H. Emerson. In Blocked Field, however, the stack of rectangular hay bales reminds us that rural work is now mechanised, industrialised and automated: a point reinforced in the art artwork by the ‘blocked’ panels that make up the image being printed directly onto the aluminium surface.

While Blocked Field challenges assumptions by confounding the field of view, Pastoral Monuments (2012) focuses on the often overlooked wildflowers that grew in a field beside Sear’s home that she collected and photographed whenever they appeared. Sear selected a jar, jug or vase that visually resonated with each type of flower and the arrangement was photographed and printed. This photographic equivalent of pressing collected flowers between the pages of a book was then taken a few steps further. The prints that were deemed successful were deliberately crumpled and re-flattened, giving each picture a pronounced texture. These images were then held in front of her kitchen window and re-photographed. The arrangements of flowers in a bowl and the fact that the work was created in the artist’s kitchen suggestively hint at clichéd notions of domesticity and femininity. However, such easy assumptions are challenged as each image is titled with the Latin, botanical name for depicted flower, deliberately referencing Mary Dillwyn’s flower studies of 1853, who was also Wales’ first female photographer. While the back-lighting of the images produces vivid colours whose luminance and subject matter most closely resembles Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers 1888, Sear is, of course, using the formal aesthetic of the painted still life to encourage us to pay closer attention to these normally undervalued blooms.

The sunflower returns however in the deeply seductive video installation, Chameleon (2013, 11 min 11 sec). The film begins in total darkness and slowly, emerging from the blackness, gradually filling the frame of the large screen is the ‘face’ of a sunflower. The use of a focused circular torch beam to illuminate the flower helps to create the allusion that the flower head looks disturbingly like an eye; an isolated disembodied eye, a visual metaphor for the all-seeing, and therefore all-powerful eye. Standing in the darkened space, illuminated in turn by the light from the screen, we begin to wonder who is being watched and who is ‘doing’ the looking? Importantly though, the generous pace of the film and the ‘wobbling’ quality of the light from the handheld torch continually breaks the illusion and returns us to the image of a sunflower, its petals fluttering to a gentle breeze. The ‘all-seeing eye’ is recognised as an impossible fantasy and ultimately an impotent threat. The question as to what we are looking at becomes an enjoyable engagement with our imagination, as we swing between the sunflower acting as a visual metaphor of ‘the eye’ and the simple singular beauty of this particular bloom.

Throughout Sear’s work on show we can engage with these various strategies that frustrate our view as a means to disrupt easy assumptions. The creation of these seductive and beautiful artworks that challenge stereotypical or clichéd methods of looking therefore act as a lure and function as a trick. But the artworks are also an invitation to us, the audience, to look for ourselves at the everyday world around us with a questioning gaze, a critical eye, with an irreverent attention.

- Liam Devlin

Helen Sear Lure is showing in Cardiff at Bay Art (25 May – 21 June, 2013) as part of Diffusion: Cardiff International Festival of Photography. For more information please click here. 

We often look at groups of people in ways that are unknown but familiar, with a curiosity about their lifestyles, unable to gain access.  Documentary photography often allows a glimpse into these situations, with a critical eye that is both enlightening and empathetic. We may wonder about Romany gypsies and their nomadic life, or the life of brothers living in isolation in a small holding in Norway, or even somebody’s intimate family relationships, but are unable to gain access into these worlds. Language, distance and time can often be barriers to a better understanding, but the camera offers a way in, and a way to show a different way of life.

Photography provides a vehicle to tell these narratives and represent our experience, and the evolving society around us. Through these viewpoints, we are offered a new vision of Europe, and the processes of economic and cultural transformation.  Contrary to photography being a medium for positive change, it has also been used as a highly manipulative medium, which can build and sustain unhelpful stereotypes and dominant ideologies.

The artists selected for European Chronicles look to dispel some of the myths and stereotypes created around certain cultures and shed a positive light. These chosen artists reflect on what it is to be living in Europe, and many themes such as identity, place and belonging. There is a strong sense of community running throughout the project, both at a local and international level. European Chronicles forms a part of European Prospects, a European project forming partnerships with photographers and organizations across Europe, engaging in a dialogue about how national identities are shaped.  The partnership aims to explore the role of photography and digital media in presenting a new iconography of Europe, and European experience from the selection of images being produced in the region.

A sense of place embodies itself in the work of many photographers selected to show as part of European Chronicles. David Barnes and Tina Carr & Annemarie Schöne work with two very different community groups sharing their experience within a contemporary Europe, which is often predicated on history.

David Barnes’ project King Tide presents an open-ended narrative working with communities in the South Wales Valley. Barnes presents a reflection of ‘home’ and a relationship with history and memory. King Tide refers to a phenomenon affecting the sea where the sun, earth and moon are aligned at ‘perigee’ and ‘perihelion’. This event often happens at night and goes unnoticed. Barnes uses this as a metaphor for the unnoticed forces often at play in our lives.

The work is purposely fragmented, where the characters appear to move between spaces; in one image, one of the characters in King Tide is shown climbing over a fence, a metaphor for the shifting nature of the work, and the various fictions and contradictions at play. The multi-layered narrative doesn’t attempt to draw conclusions but alludes to a more complex portrayal of the human condition. Barnes images ask for a slow contemplation of the wider forces at play in the characters’ lives.

Barnes’ images have a warmth and intimacy, gained through the long length of the project. Barnes portrays the characters lives and daily rituals in a positive light, rather than being judgmental, often finding humour and tenderness in the community relationship, such as the handmade artifacts and videos created by the family.

Tine Carr & Annemarie Schöne champion the rights of marginalized communities through their collaborative practice. The work presented as part of European chronicles, Once we were birds focuses on Roma and travelling communities. Often faced with persecution and police violence, the duo focus on the positive aspect of this nomadic existence, such as family relationships, the culture and rituals. Throughout the project, we get a sense of the proud traditions and way of life, and how they engage with their history. The travelling communities’ sense of place is defined by their impermanence, which has often brought prejudice, Once we were birds addresses these assumptions in a positive light, drawing attention to positive aspects of the community.

Both projects document their subjects with a humility and understanding, disregarding the negative contexts facing these communities such as unemployment and exclusion.

Other works reflect upon family and interpersonal experiences, looking at how these factors shape our own idea of place.

Anna Kurpaska’s The Visit focuses on her own relationships to her family and the place she grew up in. Having left her family home in Poland in 2007, she regularly visits and documents her ancestral home, now owned by her mother and uncle, and her relationship within its parameters. The area is at once familiar but each visit brings new events, dramas and disruption to everyday routines. Kurpaska captures life at its most ordinary, but the relationships between all the protagonists captures a sense of curiosity.

Elin Høyland project The Brothers focuses on the relationship between two brothers, Mathias (80) and Harald (75) who live in a small holding in rural Norway, away from the hustle of the city. Their existence is quiet and simple, comfortable in their solitude and companionship. The brothers follow a comfortable routine, captured by Høyland as they engage in common pastimes such as bird watching or shopping. Hoyland’s document of The Brothers portrays a sense of belonging with their locality, happy with simple pleasures and each other’s company.

These artists show an intimacy with their subjects, the familiar and unfamiliar home is examined; with Hoyland, it explores the brothers’ relationship to their smallholding, which was lived in by generations of the family, with Mathias and Harald being the last. Kurpaska’s explores the home where she grew up and often returns and how this affects her relationship to this familiar space. The passing of time is embedded within both projects and offers a poignant reminder of the temporality of place and heritage. With each visit Kurpaska reveals an unraveling of time, there are subtle changes happening throughout the series, both within the home and within relationships between the protagonists.

Time is also deeply embedded in The Brothers.  Showing a fragility to their existence as the last of their family to occupy this home, the passing of time is poetically represented with a temporality that’s ever-present throughout the whole series.

European Chronicles looks to presents Europe, not on a socio-political scale as often talked about by politicians, but a Europe on the local scale – the communities, the people and the places that make up this larger structure. There is a strong focus on the relationships between people and place, and how the two shape each other. Each artist offers the viewer a glimpse into a different life, someone else’s experience rooted in a documentary tradition. The documentary photographer is often an observer, on the outside looking in; however with these works chosen for European Chronicles, the artists have built relationships as part of the community and place, reflecting on these experiences from the inside, projecting their vision outwards for others to understand and learn.

 - Rory Duckhouse

European Chronicles, a group exhibition as part of the Diffusion Photography Festival in Cardiff, will be on view at The Cardiff Story (1 – 31 May 2013)

Crucially, each location alludes to specific environmental concerns: ‘Three Mile Island’ relates to the threat of a nuclear meltdown, ‘Beijing’ perhaps points to a rise in pollution while the opulence of ‘Las Vegas’ questions our relationship with consumption. Other images equally refer to social problems specific to a place: the urban displacement caused by the Three Gorges Dam or the exploitation of cheap labour in Dubai. These references are produced not necessarily by the image as such, but by an understanding of the place that these images represent.

The title of the project ‘Anthropocene’ is a geological term that describes how human activities have had a significant impact on the Earth’s ecosystems. The images similarly allude to the ecological and social impact of vast manmade structures. As a whole, the project questions man’s ability to create a better and more sustainable world at the cost of dwindling natural resources. Andreas Gursky – in his photograph ‘Beelitz’, 2007 for instance – might be exploring a similar agenda in his vast photographic depictions of landscapes affected by consumption and excess.

Inasmuch as the project relates to ecological and social tensions that rise in parallel to globalization, the mirroring of satellite images also relates to ideological, political and economic power. In the first instance, the project alludes to the power of representation. Satellite imaging and mapping is dominated by Google. To a large extent, our understanding of how the world looks may not be controlled by Google, but it is certainly dominated by the ever-growing economic might by the corporation.  

In the second instance, the symmetrical structure of the images divided into quarters also relates to ideological power. Governments and religious institutions have historically tapped into the persuasive powers of symmetry in their architecture. Churches are usually divided into four distinct parts, while dominant symmetrical structures are used to reinforce the ideological authority of the state. An overhead view of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral at St. Paul’s Cathedral recently published in the Guardian vividly illustrates the coming together of visual symmetry and aesthetics, on one hand, with political and religious structures, on the other hand.

This reading of Smith’s work is promoted through images that are neither didactic nor patronizing. The work could be enjoyed for purely aesthetic purposes. Yet it could also be seen to relate to some of he most pressing ecological and social issues of our time. 

- Marco Bohr

Borth is a small town on the mid-Wales coastline with the larger and better known towns of Aberystwyth and Aberdovey lying to the south and north respectively. Koppel describes Borth as having something of the wild west about it since there is but a single road, stretching for just over one kilometre, with a mishmash of houses lining both sides: traditional fishing cottages, now partly modernised, and seaside holiday homes built in the 1930s. There is no consistency to the architecture, just a sense of improvised and unselfconscious construction – a bricolage. There are few amenities other than the Acorn Fish Bar, a number of pubs, and an Animalarium which is home to a lonely ocelot and some wallabies.

It is a place which profoundly intrigues Koppel, and, having regularly walked along the beach, he decided to shoot a continuous track, from that viewpoint, at a slow walking speed, with the camera simply looking at the buildings. The duration of the shot was approximately one hour, but he then turned that into a continuous and seamless loop: the resulting work, BORTH, therefore has no beginning or end – it goes on forever.

Whilst sleep furiously was made specifically to be seen in the cinema, with every decision in its making process bearing that consideration in mind, BORTH was specifically conceived and made as a film installation to be seen in a gallery. Koppel is therefore adamant that the gallery space should not be turned into a seated venue. The initial vantage point to the screen should be one where people can stand, perhaps walk a little in relation to the screen, sit on the floor if they wish, and, if they find their curiosity provoked, stay long enough to discover the sense of narrative.

Initially BORTH was conceived of as a two-screen piece, but, because of economic and space limitations, Koppel had to reform it for Chapter as just one screen. It remains, therefore, a work in progress, and Koppel will inevitably be spending time in the installation thinking through how to develop it further, how the second screen will work, how to develop the soundtrack, and how he wants to evolve different texts for the work. This kind of making process can become very involved, and, in this case, has already been going on for several years. One problem, unsurprisingly, is monetary: working with budgets that are essentially too small for the ambition of the project. As a result, Koppel regrets that much of his time has been consumed with hustling and negotiating, thinking about logistics rather than evolving ideas – a typical state of affairs in the arts today.

Nevertheless, when critics were continually labelling sleep furiously a documentary, Koppel remained indignant that it wasn’t. He admits to finding it hard to place his work in categories or genres – something that troubles him and often leaves him feeling alienated professionally. He suggests it might be a neurotic tendency that comes from his being the child of German Jewish refugees – desperately wanting to assimilate into in a peer group, but, at the same time, being a bit too critical of that group. He confesses that, to some degree, he was being deliberately provocative in his protestations, being primarily irritated by the current tendency to conflate ideas of documentary with factual programme making. As someone who is interested in using the camera and microphone not simply as recording devices, but as microscopes through which the otherwise unseen and unheard can be discovered, documentary, to him, means so much more. Juxtapositions of scale – such as moments of human gesture contrasted with an epic quality of landscape – create, in Koppel’s mind, a distinctive idiom, one which might equate with Dziga Vertov’s coined phrase from his 1923 manifesto The Council of Three: “the sensory exploration of the world through film.” In this sense, documentary films become an exploration through forms of metaphor, creating an evocation of the subject, rather than making polemical commentary or statements of “aboutness”. Under this definition, both sleep furiously and BORTH are indeed documentaries, but, in their individual ways, very clearly also works of art.

 - Anna McNay

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BORTH by Gideon Koppel will be on view at Chapter, Cardiff  from 1 – 31 May 2013 as part of Diffusion: Cardiff International Festival of Photography

This specific work, a view of Lake Torneträsk, Sweden, near the Norwegian border, 200 kms north of the Arctic Circle, was created between midnight June 21 and midnight June 22, 2006 – the summer solstice.  A continuous 24 hours of film taken from a fixed point, displayed in ‘real time’, the action was not the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters.  But all the same it had my full attention, the main event being the ripple of waves glinting in the sunlight.  A return to the work after a walk in the Heath, and gratifyingly, it was all change:  cloud and fog masked all but the smallest spit of land, and there was now no differentiation between sea and horizon.  The mountains had gone; the movement of the water was no longer visible, masked by the low clouds.  Back the following week, three distinct landforms were now in view, the sun reflecting off the snow covered peak in the distance.  I was hooked.

Blondes has spent his whole career intensely looking at nature.  He began by working with the traditional mediums of paint, drawing and watercolour, coming to film as he felt he had ‘painted [him]self into a hole’ after turning out fifty-two paintings of the same tree.  His first film, exhibited in 2006, was originally produced as an aid to his painting.  He ended up showing it alongside the paintings at the London Art Fair in 2006.  His artistic practice is now devoted wholly to film, often filmed at locations that are either historically significant or naturally extreme.

The current landscape exhibition at Somerset House, Landmark:  The Fields of Photography, offers Londoners another chance to experience Blondes’s work. “Étang de Pezières II”, filmed at Indre-et-Loire, France, the site of a former Catholic monastery, Chartreuse de Liget, founded by Henry II to atone for the murder of St. Thomas of Canterbury, features a view of a pond through the branches of trees.  Unlike his 24 hours solstice work, Blondes has chosen different parameters for this film, which is made up of 52 one-hour segments shot weekly, the camera affixed to a bolt in a tree in order to film from the exact same location.  Over the course of a year, the camera’s focus pulls back and forth between activity on the pond and its wooded surroundings – capturing the progression of nature through the season such as rain, snow, the blossoming of leaves and sunset. Once the film arrives at summer and the trees are in full leaf, the focus is once again brought closer inside the woods. 

For this exhibition, the curator has placed the work in its own viewing space, a small alcove with four chairs.  During my recent visit I’d sit for up to 30 minutes.  Most visitors would walk by, assuming, as I had when first encountering Blondes work, the piece to be a static landscape.  But for those who lingered, the rewards included the change in hue from green to silver of the pond surface, gusts of wind bringing nearby branches in front of the lens, and as such, out of focus, two ducks, and the money shot:  the passing of two cars!  The segment of film that I chanced upon, clearly filmed sometime in spring, was dominated by shades of green. My editor, reporting back on her interest in an essay after a viewing on a different day, referred to the wonderful snow-covered leaves, the tone now browns and white.   I was just a little bit jealous, and so I returned and happened upon a snow-covered scene.  And that’s the beauty of the work, the anticipation and the possibility of seeing something totally different than what had been seen before. It is what keeps the viewer engaged.  Why these films work is because nothing much happens.  We wait for the justification, perhaps a leaf falling, and as such, it becomes a major event.  It’s about seeing life happen and the immense wonder in every part, even the smallest gesture or moment. When you tune into that, everything has utter divinity.

Blondes adheres to no set schedule in terms of determining the exact hour of filming, and that, in a sense, is what makes this art and not merely a web cam segment.  He will though set up a conceit of some sort and once decided upon, work his way through it, dictated perhaps by an extraordinary morning light, or something much more mundane such as a personal commitment.  When pressed, Blondes, not without a hint of irony, will refer to himself as an ‘accidental Buddhist’. 

But it is not until 23 hours and 59 minutes, or in this case, week 52, that Blondes knows whether or not he has something.  ‘The power of what I do is the power inherent in the length’.  It’s what makes the experience meditative.

Blondes, working closely with Apple, has a car full of computer equipment.  But he is fully aware of the irony of using all this technology to make something so ‘completely simple.’  He insists that his works must be framed and that all the technology is hidden away, so that the works don’t appear as some sort of technological set, so important to keep the experience sensual and not mechanical.  In light of Blondes’ painting background, comparisons to Monet’s Haystacks are self-evident, as well, his affinity for the works of Giorgio Morandi, which he describes as being somewhat ‘obsessive compulsive’.

Blondes states:  “What all artists do is point their finger to say, ‘look at this’”.  But it is getting increasingly hard to find anyone who will defend the view that film images, be it photographs or moving images, have a special relationship with the reality that they represent. Blondes’s works, with their lack of action, and their somewhat ambiguous message, force the viewer to establish a more analytical engagement, which goes beyond just looking at the image.  The indexical relationship to the natural pre-photographic referent is not so much to nature itself, but rather to the physical act of seeing.  In the end, the ‘enlightenment’ is not a reading of the images, but rather the awareness of what it means to ‘see’.

Critical theorist Theodor Adorno posited that the task of aesthetics ‘is not to comprehend artworks as hermeneutical objects… it is their incomprehensibility that needs to be comprehended.’  Enigmaticalness, in this sense, signifies the meaning.  Operating like a Zen Buddhist kōan, Blondes’s works demand to be deciphered, and as such we are transfixed.

- Erika Lederman (April 2013) 

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For more reading: www.jeffreyblondes.com

As minimalist visual artists, they work with the two basic prerequisites for photography – light and photosensitive paper – opting mainly for camera-less techniques, often in combination with found objects. Their professed aim is to question everyday life, intimacy, the passing of time, and the position and role of the artist and the image in today’s society.

In 1998, they were granted the Michel Jordi Photographic Award and spent six months on a residency in London. During this period, they conceived of the idea of allowing photosensitive paper the freedom to become exposed, by itself, during the run of an exhibition. From this project, their current series, Wait and See, to be shown as part of the Diffusion photography festival in Cardiff, was born. The walls of Oriel Canfas will be patterned with a selection from f&d cartier’s collection of early photographic papers, which will be allowed to become exposed throughout the duration of the exhibition. According to the composition of each individual sheet, the nature of its contact with light, and, perhaps, any interference from visitors, the papers will develop random colour patterns, perhaps, even, in front of the visitors’ very eyes, if they take the time to stand and watch. The speed at which development occurs also depends on the individual sheet’s properties, but, during the first few days, the effects are likely to be fairly instantaneous and dramatic.  After that, when the papers have become more saturated, changes are less readily visible. The virgin white photo papers colour as soon as they are presented to a light source, whereas the older papers need a longer exposure time to become saturated. None, however, ever turn black.

f&d cartier began the Wait and See series experimenting with their own expired photo papers. They then began collecting from colleagues and via the Internet. As of September 2012, their collection totalled about 300 different varieties of fibre-based photosensitive papers, ranging in age from the 1880s to 1980s. Often when they acquire the paper, it is in its original packaging, and this gives them information about its origin, the story of the brand, its projected expiry date, and so on. They have turned this research into part of their work, although they admit that it would take a professional historian of photography to look into some of the more complex papers. An example of one early paper which they use for Wait and See is Velox paper. This was invented by Leo Baekeland, a Belgian-born American chemist in 1893, and was the first photographic paper that could be printed in artificial light (as opposed to sunlight). In 1899, Baekeland sold his company, the Nepera Chemical Company, in Yonkers, New York, and, with it, the rights to Velox, to the U.S. inventor George Eastman.  Introduced by Kodak as the “first of the true gaslight papers,” Velox is a silver chloride contact print paper, which, compared to bromide paper, is very slow at developing and therefore does not require a dark room. For this reason, Velox was promoted for use by amateur photographers. The Eastman Kodak Company first listed a Velox photographic postcard stock in its 1902 catalogue. The postcard stock was discontinued in the late 1940s but the paper is still being manufactured. It is fascinating stories like this which complement the aesthetic beauty of the papers as they become exposed. Each individual sheet has its own past history and each will develop its own unique future pattern.

One might argue that f&d cartier themselves have no hand in the production of the resulting “photographs”, since they do not actively participate beyond the point of installation. The duo would be fast to rebut this suggestion, however, insisting: “We are the artists, it is our concept.” And indeed, whilst not necessarily knowing how each paper will end up, their installation is not purely haphazard. They spent nearly six months doing various test installations before their first official show, seeing how the papers would react, and getting to know the various colours and interplays. Each time they install afresh, they take time to plan a specific conceptual layout according to the given exhibition space. The installation is then, for them, a kind of “living performance”, in which f&d cartier play God, if you will. They source the papers, place them how they wish, in relation to whichever others they wish, and then provide the light source, allowing them to develop in their uniquely open-ended ways. Circumstances may intervene, and visitors may observe their chromatic evolution, but only f&d cartier may decide their ultimate fate.

 - Anna McNay

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Wait and See, an exhibition by f&d cartier as part of the Diffusion Photography Festival in Cardiff, will be on view at Oriel Canfas (1 – 31 May 2013)

For more information please visit this link.

The manipulation of prints and negatives is not new. The pictorialists scratched and combined negatives and painted on prints in order to advance the acceptance of photography as an ‘art’. Photographers such as Frank Eugene, Gertrude Kӓsebier and Edward Steichen had begun their careers as painters so their incorporation of painting techniques into their photography was no surprise. In 1899 the critic Sadakichi Hartmann wrote of Eugene’s work, “He is essentially a painter, and looks at photography merely as a new medium to express his artistic individuality…We can find in his work all those qualities known to every student of painting”.[1] Throughout the history of photography, artists such as Man Ray have used techniques which ensure that the resulting prints present few of the indexical qualities for which photography has long been acclaimed.  But how do the artists of  today, working in the digital age, differ from their predecessors and what motivates their practice? This article will look at the work of four contemporary British-resident artists who are challenging the boundaries between photography and other media: Julie Cockburn, Aliki Braine, Darren Harvey-Regan and Nathalie Hambro.

Like Stezager, Julie Cockburn is not a photographer. Originally trained as a sculptor, she works with found images which she transforms through cutting and collaging, as evidenced in her 2012 image  ‘Blue Jumper’.  She also adds other media such as embroidery, drawing with biros and correction fluid or sticking plastic onto the surface of a print, as seen in her image  ‘Face’.  The art world has long privileged the unique object and Cockburn’s interventions transform the reproducible print into an original art object. Her work is frequently categorised  in exhibitions as ‘photography’, however, and it raises questions as to the limits of the medium today.

Cockburn typically works with portraits, which she alters in order to hint at hidden characteristics of the sitter. For Cockburn, however, the indexical nature of the photographic portrait amounts to an ‘incomplete truth’ which she expands through the use of other media.  She combines the documentary tradition of the photograph with the imaginary possibilities of drawing, sewing and collage. Her aim is not simply to facilitate the acceptance of the work as ‘art’ in the manner of the pictorialists but to inject layers of suggestion which cause the viewer to embark on an imaginary journey, querying who the portrait subject really was, rather than accepting the photographic evidence. She has said of her work “I try to unearth something that isn’t being said within a photo. Photos have a flatness, a promise that they don’t quite fulfil”.[2]

Aliki Braine  also trained as a sculptor. Unlike Cockburn however, she has, until recently, used photography in her work in the traditional sense of using a camera to create an image. Yet the resulting prints are not quite photographs in the customary, indexical sense. Her work is rooted in the traditions of landscape painting and, like Cockburn, she felt frustrated by the documentary constraints of photography: “I was seeking out the archetypal landscape. I was going out into the landscape, but couldn’t find it in the real world, so I needed to rework the photo to meet my aesthetic concerns”.[3] Braine’s solution was to treat the photographic negative as a surface for manipulation. Braine paints and draws on the negative in black ink to create an eerie white blanket in the resulting print, as seen in her series ‘Draw Me A Tree’ of 2006  or the ‘White Out Sky’ images of 2007, in which imaginary ‘clouds’ are interspersed with real ones. She also works with pins and hole-punchers to transform the negative into an abstraction, as seen in the series ‘The Hunt’ of 2008.  The series references a painting by Paolo Uccello, but Braine’s abstractions force the viewer to conceptualise and imagine beyond the photographic evidence presented in the print. Thus both Cockburn and Braine challenge their viewers by inviting an imaginative discourse with their images. Unlike Cockburn’s images, however, Braine’s prints retain their reproductive quality, although she has stressed that the interventions on her negatives weaken them to such an extent that she can only work with very small editions.

Braine’s recent work takes the process of abstraction even further. She has stopped loading film into a camera and hole-punches colour film which has been developed, but not exposed. The result is a print on paper with grey and black tones which hints strongly at the use of a photographic process, although the indexical qualities of photography have now been completely eliminated. The image exists purely as a physical object in itself with no element of photographic representation of the referent.

Another artist whose work constantly questions the relationship between a photograph and the referent  is Darren Harvey-Regan. The incorporation of physical objects into his work frequently raises questions as to whether the artwork is a photograph or a sculpture. A recent example is his work  ‘Phrase (a fragment), Fragment (a phrase)’ in which a rock is mounted on a wall above a photograph of the rock, which rests on the floor. The initial impact of the rock hanging where a photograph would normally hang immediately brings into question the relationship between the rock and the photograph. But although we are told that the rock is the same object portrayed in the photograph, they look different. The rock can be viewed from different angles, which give rise to different shadows and plays of light, all of which are different from the viewpoint portrayed in the photograph. We become aware of the image in the photograph being distinct from the rock that we are looking at and hence we recognise the photograph as a physical object  in its own right, a physicality that is underscored by the solidity of the rock portrayed.

The concept of the photograph as an object becomes more immediate when the photographs take the form of a photobook, an object that is designed to be picked up and whose pages must be physically turned in order to see the photographs. Nathalie Hambro’s recent work  ‘Sin – Unseen’ is a limited edition artist’s book which presents a series of her polaroid images.  Her broad-based art practice is reflected in the work: Hambro has previously worked as a designer of jewellery and handbags and she is an award-winning author. The book design reflects a theme which is recurrent in her recent work – the incorporation of industrial materials.  She frequently presents her photographs in hand-tooled frames crafted from metals which incorporate elements such as ball-bearings and  copper mesh and which form part of the artwork itself.  In ‘Sin-Unseen’ the photographs are presented inside a perspex cover secured with a lock whose combination reflects the edition number, and the title is stamped into a stainless steel strip. The book is housed in a pouch constructed  from reflective industrial fabric with an embossed metal tag and is accompanied by a pair of hand-dyed gloves. The book’s design and its physical qualities are clearly of equal importance as its photographic contents.

The common theme in the work of the four artists discussed is their combination of photography with other media, which challenges the categorisation of the work.  The physical nature of the work is paramount, which perhaps reflects a reaction against the pervasion of screen-based imagery which surrounds us today. In one sense they are continuing a tradition of manipulation and enhancement in photography but, in this digital age, the ‘handmade’ is perhaps assuming new importance. These artists are creating unique ‘objects’ or producing work in very limited editions which counter the ease of reproduction of digital work today.

- Felicity Cole

This access to the exotic does not merely satisfy an escapist mentality, but it also tells us something about ourselves, only by bumping up and testing ourselves against the other do we define who we are. There is a good deal of the exotic enmeshed in Emma Critchley’s photographic and video works, in that they usher us into worlds and situations to which we would not normally have access, and the experience of which taps the ineffable.  They conjure strange visions that challenge our well-rehearsed, loosely-fitting comfort zones – underwater scenes that make us want to hold our breath while we lose all sense of time. In her video ‘Waters Meet: Breath’, a tributary stream unburdens itself of its suspension of silt, at its confluence with the main stream. Delicate pulses of silt are unfurled into the stronger flow in intricate spiral and curlicue forms, like smoke in the water, that are instantly stretched, diluted and then dissolved by the stronger and clearer dominant current. As each thrust of silt is absorbed by, and vanishes in, this current, another instantly follows on only to be likewise transmuted. This endless process varies only in its waxing and waning in tune with variations in rainfall. It’s a slower world down there, where the random and the rhythmic listlessly vie for precedence in this parallel existence, this unseen other, existing for us only through Critchley’s patient and painstaking camera work. It makes us think, perhaps, about the delicacy of micro-worlds that hide within and yet underpin the greater scheme of things. As the pace of existence speeds up through the digitalisation of our activities, we are confronted more and more by surfaces that have no apparent connection with each other but are brought into relationship through the workings of micro-electronics and, consequently, things become less and less real, more and more virtual, and superficiality replaces significance or rather the superficial comes to appear significant. As we lose contact with the depth of things, with their intricacy, as a result of our tighter and tighter economics of time, we become less and less rooted in the natural world. Critchley’s video subtly and gently reminds us of, and re-connects us with, that preternaturally different pace of the natural world. 

Contrapuntal with the visual rhythms played out by the pulses of unfurling silt, depicted in this video, are the sonic rhythms of echoic breathing, contained in the accompanying soundtrack. The recorded sounds of the deep-breathing of a diver preparing him or herself to do a free-dive – an uncanny sequence of sounds, that is in itself other-worldly – confront our ears. This is actually predicated on the very natural and non-exotic activity of breathing. The pulses of silt (the breathing of the water?) and the pulses of the divers breathing, while being contrapuntal and disconnected, nevertheless convey an impression of empathy that propagates a feeling of calm and tranquillity that is in turn reinforced by that ambience of timelessness that pervades the work. 

‘Mesmeric’ would seem to be the perfect adjective to use as a description of this work. Critchley’s fascination for underwater environments and events that take place there, shines through, conveying senses of both awe and respect for a milieu that that is as challenging as it is exhilarating. By imbuing real scenes with a sense of fantasy without the use of digital manipulation, Critchley uses her imagination to create images that motivate the viewer’s own imagination.  Critchley’s canon of work is quite divergent and includes underwater portraits, variably expressing both stasis and motion, taken in pools or tanks, as well as images both still and moving in non-populated natural waters.  All this work is under the spell of the seductive qualities of water as a unique photographic environment, with all its distortions of time and space. Long may her love-affair with the submerged continue.

- Roy Exley

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More information on Emma Critchley’s work, including videos of ‘Waters Meet: Breath’ and ‘Figures of Speech, series 1 & 2′ , as well as news of current exhibitions including The Front View gallery in Whitstable, can be seen on www.emmacritchley.com

In the case of the photographer, the embodiment, the materialisation, the revelation must lie in his choice of angle. It is not so much the objects he captures, the objects built by an architect or arranged so as to create an architectural effect, that are distinctive of James Smith’s images, though they do belong together, form a series on the grounds of a certain grey-brownish bulkiness. They are all firmly placed on the flat surface of a field, a lawn or a derelict industrial terrain. And they are all exposed to the wintry weather, with the exception of one object that looks like an abandoned Guggenheim. The coiling ramp of a multi-storey car-park is seen from within as it encircles an open, no less bleak space. A stony and grassy ring traced on the soil appears to be a sort of inner landing spot for vehicles gone astray.

Yet rather than the objects themselves, what distinguishes Smith’s images is the fact that because of the angle he chooses, whether focusing the camera on an object or displaying the photographs next to each other on a wall, they seem both to represent and to serve as devices of orientation. Perhaps Smith even turns the objects and the images into monuments of a former secret location, a location on a crazy map known to the artist alone.

But the time is out of joint, as usual. The spatial coordinates are traversed by a temporal dislocation because it is impossible to decide whether the present moment, the seasonal and yet eternal now of the image, refers to a past buried in the artist’s memory or to a future to be exhumed from times immemorial. When did, when will, the chariots of the gods land? Here, with a humour that is all the more eccentric the more its matter-of-factness proves unassailable, or the more it launches the empiricism of the dirt into the quirky turbulences of the skies, is the artist’s visual evidence of the impossible. Will they really touch down in the middle?

James Smith gives an answer to the old and exhausting question of what it is that makes photography an art form. For if art must always retain an enigmaticalness that can only be resolved at the cost of art coming to an end, an enigmaticalness factually established and not intentionally sought, then art is always addressed to the gods, not as an appeal or a message but rather as a testimony of what is the case in the world, as a photograph. The naive aspect of science fiction or fantasy consists in that it wants to photograph the addressees themselves. Each time the addressee is identified, art capitulates and becomes science fiction or fantasy, regardless of the genre attributed to a specific work. It is such ingenuousness that Smith refuses. His photographic landscape is entirely contained within itself and thereby unlocked, sensitive, alive. 

- Alexander García Düttmann

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James Smith lives and works in both London and Northampton and studied at the Royal College of Art 2010/12. Recent solo exhibitions include Temporal Dislocation, Photofusion, London 2013;  London Overspill, UH Galleries, Hatfield 2012; Luton Overlay, Departure Lounge, Luton 2012/13; and selected group exhibitions:  Territory, Liverpool Biennial 2012, Guest & Host, NN Gallery, Northampton 2012/13, Alt. 1000+, Photography Festival, Rossiniere, Switzerland 2011 and Construct, Folkestone Biennale, 2011. James Smith’s solo exhibition at Photofusion Gallery, London runs from 25 January – 8 March  www.j-smith.co.uk

Alexander García Düttmann is Professor of Philosophy and Visual Culture at Goldsmiths (University of London) and Visiting Professor in the Department of Photography at the Royal College of Art. His latest publications include Participation: Consciousness of Semblance (Konstanz University Press 2011), Naive Art: An Essay on Happiness (August Verlag 2012) and Seeing for Others (Black Dog 2012).

Aligning pictorial expression with musical qualities is not new. Taking their cue from the Symphonies in oil paint by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, photographers first took on this ambition from the 1880s, through to the 1920s, the time of the Pictorialists. During this period, the titles of photographs submitted to society exhibitions shifted, typically from the names of people and places to those such as Harmony or Tonal Study. Subject matter became less important than the tone or mood implied by the work. This approach was inspired also by Japanese art, specifically by the visual patterning, and study of proportional balance of light and dark known as ‘notan’. Crepuscular scenes, and a deliberate softening of focus, completed the ambience. Setting aside the potential meanings of Hughes’ title for his recent series for a moment, it would be satisfying enough to understand his work as a form of neo-Pictorialism, a subtle set of exercises in colour harmony inflected with melancholic atmosphere. However, Hughes’ work has a still more specific twentieth-century, Modernist lineage.

Any photographer pointing his or her camera to the heavens contends with the legacy of Alfred Stieglitz’s famed series of pictures of the sky. Made between 1923 and 1936, he titled them initially Songs of the Sky and then Equivalent. Utilising clouds, sun and moon – subjects available to everyone – these small, jewel-like works imply that remarkable photographs need not rely on unusual subjects. Moreover, the factual object of a photograph is not the end in itself. Like notes of music, the images could act as the point of departure for a parallel psychological or emotional state evoked in the viewer: just as the sky is unhinged from the horizon – resulting in a free interpretation of the orientation of the photograph – so there is no fixed reading as to what the image may mean. Representing or reflecting human emotions in the external forms of nature has many sources, but some of its immediate pre-photographic roots relevant here can be found in the eighteenth-century concept of the ‘Sublime’ (as expressed in the writings of Edmund Burke, or the paintings of John Martin). Experiencing and exaggerating the immensity and power of the natural world – such as mountains, chasms, the open sea at night, or roiling cloud forms – made man seem insignificant. The Sublime imagination was a form of pleasure tinged with terror. Such experiential interpretations of landscape took on both meteorological and autobiographical meaning in the most obvious artistic referent for cloud studies: the work of John Constable. However, if the subject as depicted in pencil and paint seemed closed by Constable, photography renewed the genre. Captured with the exactitude and alchemy of light sensitive materials, and emerging at the same time as Gestalt psychology, Stieglitz’s brooding skies gained added meaning. Gestalt principles hinged on theories of visual perception describing how people tend to organise disparate visual elements into groups, or unified wholes according to their similarity, continuation or proximity. It is a way to make links and locate meaning, even in the most abstracted circumstances. Simultaneously answering a practical concern and perhaps hinting at the answer to a metaphysical question, Stieglitz wrote on the reverse of some of the Equivalents: ‘all ways are up’.

In addition to my own curatorial and art historical perspective, it is perhaps the very openness of Hughes’ work that suggests a need to locate it among such nodal points of historical precedent. His understanding and blend of the Sublime, Pictorialism and ‘equivalence’ – alongside intimations of a study of psychology and comparative spirituality – unashamedly stakes a claim for photography’s poetic, abstract values rather than primarily as a vehicle for transmitting visual information, or reporting directly on daily events. Unlike some contemporary conceptual art photography, it does not deal in the currency of irony, or linguistic and critical theory. If its abstracted imagery is then open to the criticism of appearing merely decorative, it is equally open to evoking a psychological-spiritual realm for the viewer that can reward metaphorical readings.

Hughes speaks of reflecting an inner condition in his images, withdrawing from city life to the country in search of wilderness and personal inner space. Seeking the curative powers of nature, and a correspondingly reduced carbon footprint, his journeys to find subject matter are reduced to the walked circumference around his own home in Cornwall. He cites as inspiration a passage from Henry David Thoreau’s lecture and essay, Walking published in 1862, and now recognised as one of the chief founding texts of the environmental movement:

The walker in the familiar fields … sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners’ deeds, as it were in some faraway field. … These farms which I have myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the glass, and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.

Thoreau’s references to chemistry, fixing, fading and a glass surface must surely refer to the practices of photography, even if he does not name it as such. Hughes literally acts as Thoreau’s camera, likewise looking for, and attempting to register, the transcendent within the outer appearances of nature. For Hughes, finding unspoilt areas of wilderness untouched by human presence proved nearly impossible. Only the sky or the ocean offered the edge of human interference and with it a metaphorical rather than an actual space. The spatial and temporal ambiguity of his subject matter creates this shift in perception. In this elemental realm, and through Hughes’ digital manipulation of analogue photographic images, clouds become interchangeable with waves, and light is the ultimate dematerialised marker of cosmic time. It is an illusionary space that, although derived from nature, only exists in the photographs. In these turbid shapes, a sensitive chaos of flowing forms suggests the interconnectedness of all life, a pantheistic view of existence that Wordsworth, Whitman or Thoreau would have recognised.

Hughes’ contemplation of this state is tempered with regret because he regards its earthly manifestation as one that humankind has polluted and altered to such a degree that we have already sealed our own doom. Yet, there is a redeeming point of solace. For him, the images are ‘a post apocalyptic allegory of nature’s renewal regardless of our folly’. The cosmos will ultimately be indifferent to mankind’s destruction of his environment. It will heal itself. For this reason, Hughes chooses not to dwell on negative depictions of destroyed landscape, however much compelling surface beauty they may have, to make his point. These kinds of images, he notes, have ‘a wearing psychological effect upon the viewer’. Instead, ‘by engaging a more sensory response I aim to persuade of the virtues of preserving that which remains’. There is then, a sense of having made peace with inevitable destruction, and despite some scenes of turbulence, the images are imbued with a calming assignation. Drawn from elements of actual everyday natural cycles, the works are the imaginings of such decline and renewals on a cosmic scale.        

In a massively burgeoning era of materialism and non-sensate media communication, the artist is a vital organ of communicative sense perception. The artist that brings awareness to states of ‘being’ rather than ‘having’ must necessarily, if paradoxically, use items in the material world – be they photographs, tools of digital technology or musical instruments – to create signs that point to the ineffable. If there is some air of pretence detectable in this, it is because the words and signs used always fall short of the actual experience. All they can do, like making an indication on a map, is to draw a circle around the place where the true centre lies.

Here is a closing cadence. The editor of the online magazine for which this piece was written met with Hughes to look at his prints in the splendour of the original refreshment rooms at the Victorian and Albert Museum. At first, they struggled to find a surface clear and large enough to lay the images out upon. And then, where it could not be more apt, they saw the lid of a grand piano.

- Martin Barnes, Senior Curator, Photographs. Victoria and Albert Museum, London (September 2012)

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Nicholas Hughes  will be exhibiting new works in a solo exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, opening 7 February 2013.

Similar to works by the German artist Joachim Schmid or, more recently, the Canadian artist Jon Rafman, Henner’s project raises an important question about authorship and ownership. Like Schmid and Rafman, Henner appropriates images which are produced by Google’s omnipresent cameras and then made available to the public via the various Google platforms. In other words, the initial production and eventual availability of the image – supposedly for the benefit of Google’s economic growth – is a precondition for Henner’s appropriation. The image would not exist if it wasn’t for Google’s investment; photographing, cataloguing and mapping virtually every street, road and highway in the industrialized world. Henner’s authority on the subject does not stem from producing the image, but rather, it stems from recognizing a pattern, collecting, assembling and publishing images that, in sum, produce a meaning that would have otherwise been lost in cyberspace. Here, Henner has more in common with a curator whose skill lies in identifying, locating, exhibiting and theoretically contextualizing images.

Since the images from Google Street View are freely available online to everyone with an internet connection, artists working with such images consistently encounter issues regarding originality. For instance, a photograph of a black woman in a bikini standing on the side of the road in the Italian countryside appears both in Henner’s No Man’s Land and also Jon Rafman’s Nine Eyes – the title of which refers to the nine cameras mounted on top of Google’s cars that traverse up and down the country. Similarly titled ‘Italy, Controguerra, Abruzzi’ and ‘Strada Provinciale 1 Bonifica del Tronto, Controguerra Teramo, Italia’ respectively, and in spite of slightly different cropping and image coloration, it is unclear whether Rafman borrowed from Henner or vice versa. This case is perhaps less indicative of the universal availability of appropriated images than it is indicative of how these images are sourced. Rather than aimlessly traversing virtual roads and streets online, Henner’s methodology partially relies on other internet users making a discovery of the odd, the curious, or, in this case, the deeply voyeuristic image from Google’s image archive. In that sense, Henner sources the dynamics of the masses both in the sense that he is searching for individual images amongst an immeasurable mass of images, and also, that this search is facilitated by an anonymous mass of people unwittingly aiding Henner in his project.

Apart from collecting and appropriating photographs, it is important to note that Henner is a photographer himself. In his series In a Foreign Field, Henner photographed young music fans descending on the Spanish town Benicàssim which hosts the largest music festival outside the UK to target British visitors. Henner writes: ‘For four days in July, barren Spanish fields are turned into playgrounds of escape littered with casualties of excess.’ The photographs depict revellers passed out on the grassy fields, their physical disposition perhaps fuelled by the consumption of alcohol and drugs. These tranquil and unusually seductive nocturnal portraits are strongly reminiscent of Sleeping Soldiers – a series of portraits of Iraq-based American soldiers by the late war photographer Tim Hetherington. Other projects too, such as a portrait of post-industrial Oldham titled Borderland, pay acute attention to the social, political and ideological agency of photography and its histories.

As a result of Henner’s knowledge of photographic practices, his work is spiked with references to photography not only as a device to document social conditions, but also, as a cultural practice in constructing social conditions. In Collected Portraits, Henner produced short videos which shows portraits produced by well-known photographers of the 20^th century – each video represents the work of one photographer. In these videos, Henner cleverly superimposed portraits so that the eyes, nose and mouth of the subjects match each other resulting in fascinating montages such as Forty-two portraits by Nobuyoshi Araki, Thirty-two portraits by Sally Mann and Forty portraits by August Sander. Apart from the different age, gender and race of Araki’s, Mann’s or Sander’s subjects, the project alludes to photography’s power in creating cultural stereotypes that inevitably inform historical processes: the submissive Japanese woman in Araki’s work, the innocent child in Mann’s photographs, or Sander’s typological investigation of a cross-section of German society during the Weimar Republic. Henner’s work shows that there is little doubt over photography’s impact on our perception of others, and, inevitably, our perception of ourselves.

Henner’s refreshing approach to photography alludes to a variety of related yet also disparate disciplines and methodologies: historical, technological, ethnographical, sociological and vernacular. Here, Henner consciously appears to push against the boundaries of documentary photography asking the viewer to (re-) consider his trust in the camera and modern technology. Looking at No Man’s Land, Henner’s collection of images thus confronts the viewer with a surprising question. What is more shocking? The crudity of the sex trade on the allegorical margins of our societies, or, the unstoppable invasion of the camera in every aspect of our lives spurred by financial interests. This question is further provoked by the vantage point of the Google camera, looking down on the subjects as they either avoid, not notice, ignore, or act for the camera. These differing reactions, as subtle as they may be, are a powerful reminder that our problematic relationship with photography is – informed by our historical understanding of the photographic apparatus – constantly in flux.

Recent work by Mishka Henner is on show in Rome until 28 October 2012, at the ‘Fotografia Festival Internazionale di Roma’ in an exhibition curated by Paul Wombell.

http://mishka.lockandhenner.com/

Walls always have two sides, each often very different from the other whether those sides be internal, external, either, or both. These variable aspects have something of the Gestalt about them; as we cannot see both sides at the same time the qualities of neither side can ameliorate the other, a schizophrenic quality that imbues them with a certain element of mystery.  The fact that we usually take walls for granted is a given – little about walls occupies our everyday consciousness, let alone surprises us – but at the same time this disregard is unjustified.  The London-based photographer Elliott Wilcox would like to shake us out of such complacency.

In two of Wilcox’s recent photographic projects, ‘Courts’ and ‘Walls’, walls are given the starring role.  The raison d’etre of these walls is to be touched but in very different ways and for very different reasons. Their very reality is, however, in question; when we first view Wilcox’ ‘Walls’ series, they could well be showing slickly offered simulacra of some parallel, alien world, presented with a crispness to match one of Thomas Demand’s immaculate reconstructions of historic events that are so painstakingly constructed and photographed.  The precision of the enigmatic, ambiguous edges, corners, and conjunctions of lines we witness here don’t at first match anything that equates with our previous experiences (unless we are committed rock-climbers or mountaineers) and the lumps and blocks that punctuate the geometry of these walls, in their randomness, seem like mere accidents. The fact that they really do represent reality comes as something of a surprise. 

In a similar way, the Canadian photographer Lynne Cohen has photographed places equally unfamiliar – military installations, health spas, target ranges, the classroom of a mortuary school – but these images depict strangely clinical, enigmatic and potentially sinister spaces which are usually off limits to ordinary people. The visually seductive photographs of modern architectural interiors by the German photographer Matthias Hoch also offer a similar mien but have a far slicker, more commercial aspect than Wilcox’s photographs, in which paradox and enigma engage in a fight for dominance.  

That old cautionary admonition, ‘Walls have ears’ sprang to my mind as I viewed these photographs, the angular geometric tilting and swivelling of these climbing walls suggests a clandestine life whose crisp crystalline sounds go largely unheard.  These walls sport asymmetrical lobes, receptors rather than ears; smooth protrusions with frictionally enhanced surfaces invite the climb by taunting the climber with their challenging presence. The slicked smears and stripes of black rubber quieten the once vibrant colours of the synthetic holds, whose bold chromatic rhythms now calmed, become calmer as time passes.

These climbing walls have a distinctly other-worldly quality, a whimsical constellation of forms whose visual weirdness is solidly aided and abetted by the framing and camera angles that Wilcox employed when executing these images. The bizarrely shaped protuberances firmly fixed to these walls all demand different methods of deployment by the climbers, some require a pinch-grip, some a side grip, or with a vertical orientation, require a lay-back, some a fist wedge, some a hang-grip requiring a pendulum move.  If you begin to study these synthetic hand-holds – some like lumps of discarded chewing gum, some like mysterious amulets (sympathetic magic to assist the climber’s progress?), some like dissected brains, yet others like unidentifiable visceral remains spattered across and clinging immovably to the spots where they landed (we begin to hope that these aren’t the sites of gruesome climbing accidents) – you can start to imagine how climbers might move up or across these walls. Like simulacra of spider man in their shiny lycra tights and their fitted-like-gloves, elastic sticky-soled pumps, puzzlingly emboldened by the challenge of the fact many of those blebs scattered around their vertical tracks look totally implausible as footholds.  

There is something decidedly eerie and uncanny about the sight of these unpopulated walls, which were created to be populated.  There is an air of forlorn melancholia about their look here, not a sense of neglect or even emptiness but a sense of loss, not a void, but something more rarefied and cleansed of meaning by the presence of absence. Wedged in a lacuna between two states of reality, neither one is operative, but each subliminally suggested.

As well as offering us visually intriguing forms, these photographs of climbing walls also introduce the notion that architecture can actually afford us tactile satisfaction.   Like sculpture created specifically for the visually impaired, why shouldn’t buildings offer haptically stimulating facades whose surface appearance might be improved by the patina resulting from the constant attention of the hands of passers-by?   A symbiotic relationship could be formed between buildings and their users, who would no longer be abusers but creative users through their marking of the walls.  Gaston Bachelard’s reference to the ‘polyphony of the senses’ [1], in his book The Poetics of Reverie, might thereby come closer to realisation in our hands-on experiences of the urban environment. In Wilcox’ ‘Walls #3’ we observe that the patination of the walls by the transient and yet deliberate passage of chalk-coated fingers and rubber-soled feet has begun to camouflage the once stark monochromatic surfaces of the concrete.  The deadness of concrete has been brought to life through the layered signatures of human presence, just as Wilcox’s images, through his presence, have enabled him to endow these walls with a uniquely oblique and startlingly paradoxical sense of life. In his ‘Walls #1’ the scuffing of hands and feet have selectively removed the blue painted surface of the wall to reveal an abstract expressionist version of yellow, randomly spattered around the areas of busiest climbing traffic, creating a minimalist rendition of a Jackson Pollock work.

In his book, The Eyes of the Skin, the Finnish architect, Juhani Pallasmaa, describes an experience of the city that accords well with these notions of a multi-sensual relationship with the urban environment, when he writes, “I confront the city with my body; my legs measure the length of the arcade and the width of the square; my gaze unconsciously projects my body onto the façade of the cathedral, where it roams over the mouldings and contours, sensing the sizes of recesses and projections; my body weight meets the mass of the cathedral door and my hand grabs the door pull as I enter the dark void behind. I experience myself in the city, and the city exists through my embodied experience.” [2]

The work of artists, such as Wilcox, which might be described as ‘Slow Art’, where in a timeless way the liminal becomes focal, where the peripheries are moved towards the centre of our attention with a consequent expansion of our perceptions,  would seem to offer an emollient to the superficial haste of the ‘byte and move on’ mentality of the digital celerity that increasingly drives our society. Informational burn-out looms and our desire for immediacy, along with the hegemony of urgency, threaten to run out of control. Every now and then the brakes need to be judicially applied. I feel my heart race as I consider all this, then as I look at one of Wilcox’s ‘Walls’ series, I feel calm once again returning, I feel their ameliorating effect; these are no mandalas, but the calming, centring influence of these images is tangible.  I’m quite sure that this aspect of these photographs was far from his intentions when Wilcox created them, but as per the ‘Theory of Reception’, each viewer’s unique response to an artwork can radically transform its ontology, whether it be image, text, sculpture, etc.    

References:

1] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie, Beacon Press, Boston, 1971. Page 6.

2] Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, 2005. Page 40. 

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For more information on Elliott Wilcox: http://www.elliottwilcox.co.uk/

His first monograph, Wake, was published by Steidl in 2008, and brings together a selection of photographs that Jeppesen took over the course of seven years, while traveling on assignment.

The book Wake opens with an air of restlessness. In the first page we see a dead, fallen tree in the middle of a pine forest. Second page, a cupboard with china cups, red drops spilt all over. Then we come across a letter: two people who love each other are apart. Presumably one of them is away, travelling; the other one is waiting at home. One wrote something about a plant dying. The other replied, “I wanna hear yr voice on the phone, maybe t’morrow?” Who knows?

An atmosphere of uncertainty traverses the pages; an expectation in every image, a sense of something happening and yet everything appears so quiet and calm. The quietness is pregnant with discomfort, like an untold story. A mixture of heavy darkness, foggy lights and wet air floats over places, things and living beings. Insignificant objects and situations are invested with a secret narrative that the imagination of the viewer is encouraged to unfold. A plastic chair next to a staircase outside a balcony; an unoccupied table in a restaurant; a crooked letterbox behind a fence in the middle of the night.

Most of the images are pervaded by a sense of loneliness: the loneliness of the traveller. Empty landscapes, empty rooms and empty streets. Only a few living beings are present across the book: the person who writes the letter at the beginning of the book, a dog, a thoughtful woman sat on a table, another woman (or maybe the same, we really can’t tell as her face is turned away from us) standing in front of a mirror and a person lying in the shadows. However, these presences only emphasise the sense of absence. None of them are interacting with the photographer, either because they are ignorant of his presence or just because they are too immersed in their own thoughts to realize that they have company. However it is, their appearance seems to leave with us a stronger feeling of loneliness and distance. It becomes clear from the scarce portraits scattered throughout the narrative that this traveller is an observer, an outsider, a curious soul.

Adam Jepessen’s most recent and ongoing project is called Flatlands Camp Project, and it is essentially the documentation of a solitary journey through the Americas that started in the Arctic and ended in Antarctica over a period of 487 days.

Most of the images within this project are landscapes: the vast land lying at the feet of the adventurer. Horizons, kilometres of deserted earth and sea. Traces of the journey are present in the photographs: scratches, stains and dust that remained on the surface of the negative as the traveller carried them all the way through his expedition. Traces that invest the photographs with a sense of physicality and tell us about the journey as much as the images themselves do. Through them, we feel the tiredness and the struggle of the traveller making his way through foreign territory.

The narrative is serene and slow; as with his previous work, what we see is filled with an uncanny atmosphere. There is always the same sense of absence hovering over the desolated landscapes, the empty territories and the incommensurable and secretive nature. In fact, this work could make us think of those Romantic figures in Friedrich’s paintings, with their backs to us, contemplating in a sort of ecstasy the sublime beauty of nature. However, this time we don’t see the back of the traveller but we are instead allowed straight into his eyes, staring into the raw eternity of an agitated sea.

In Flatlands Camp Project the only human presence is the one of the photographer himself, the lonely witness of his own journey. Usually blurred and undefined, his presence is diffused and ghostly or half concealed, as though about to vanish. It seems as if that diluted figure that he offers as a self-portrait serves as a metaphor to represent the fluid character of his work, sharing with us a flowing and open narrative free from the burdens of truth and objectivity.

But Flatlands Camp Project is much more than a mere group of documentary images about a trip. Because of the way the artist conceives his work, the way he produces it and the way he chooses to show it and install it (deconstructing the image into different pieces, then assembling them back together with pins), his art reaches out from the boundaries of photography and makes an incursion into those of performance and sculpture. The photographs in Jeppesen’s project became an artistic object that can’t be isolated from the way the artist produces them, constructs them and displays them.

Going through Adam Jeppesen’s work is like embarking in a mental journey. It doesn’t teach us anything, but encourages us to feel. His photographs don’t give us any facts. Even if they are the product of a trip, they don’t tell us about people, places or foreign cultures and traditions the way we expect travel photography to. In fact, we are unable to tell where each photograph was taken, as the artist doesn’t give us any information about it. However, looking at these images, we still feel the power of the journey, the amazement of the traveller, the nostalgia and the mystery while staring into never ending horizons. And this is where the magic of these photographs resides. This traveller is a dreamer, with the sensitivity of an artist engaged with beauty and adventure. And by going into his images, so are we.

———

Work by Adam Jeppesen is currently on view in the exhibition ‘Do You Remember the First Time?’ through 8 September 2012 at Atlas Gallery, London.

Casting an eye around the gallery, the effect was of a cluster of abstract photographs, perfectly and meticulously hand-printed (everything analogue), involving controlled lighting associated with the still-life tradition and calculated compositions as coolly detached as laboratory experiments.   

The gallery’s white walls served as a perfect background for Bailes’ darkly glowing images which are often hard to pin down and sometimes seem to exist as reflections; intangible objects created with space, light and form. In a brief statement, he explained: “I am interested in the mechanics of the image. I want to know what something will look like as a photograph. What form does a code or symbol take? How does an encounter appear to us?”   

In conversation, Bailes floats abstract questions to himself into the air; philosophical queries loop in circles with everyday terms weaving abstract and descriptive revelations about his processes and intentions.

Returning to the BMX bikes and skate boards, he revealed that ‘A’ levels in photography and graphic design established an attachment to the formal element of future works. “I was interested in navigating the streets and interpreting the objects we encountered. It was a great way of looking and I think I carried that on into photography. Translating the forms on the street into something other than what they were made for – hand-rails and marble ledges are made to look solid but you notice how they are formed out of a lot of geometric shapes. We got into making our own jumps and having a feel for how far the gap can be; the construction was very mathematical.”  

Connections from that time still flow through today’s explorations of space and form. “I see it in terms of my interests in all aspects of objects and composition, from that early consideration of translating forms into something else.”

Bailes’ series titled Recovery (2011) is presented as a row of silver gelatin prints whose shiny black surfaces appear to have sustained cuts by a fine razor blade – as if Lucio Fontana had been at work to allow light of different intensities to shoot through the blackness.  There is a musicality to these works, an imagined Minimalist soundtrack or the repeated rhythm patterns of Michael Nyman, in a synaesthetic relationship between image and music. Close observation reveals one dazzling line turned at an angle like the corner of a box lid or book page, and suddenly the insubstantiality vanishes, a third dimension emerges and the optical effect implies a tangible object rather than a creation involving only light and space. “These are photographs of objects I arranged in the studio,” Bailes said, “Then I created the effect with a single light source. I didn’t shoot the pictures in the way that they are displayed, they are rotated 90 degrees anti-clockwise.” 

Bailes shared the musical suggestion and revealed that he also works as a lighting designer in performances with the German pianist, Nils Frahm. “Although he’s playing piano and I’m making photographs, there is a sensitivity that we both adhere to and both of us are using analogue technology in our media. [The collaboration is ]very much about the feel of the construction, the mechanics and the emotion of the piano: he records with sounds of the piano, the foot pedal and the creaking chair in the same way that I make the mistakes in my printing part of my compositions and the fact of the three dimensions.” 

An installation commissioned in 2011 [by INTEL and Jotta] for a London church, saw Recovery re-titled as Re-Mastered. Here, a large number of prints were propped up like jet-black tombstones on the stone floor and this time, the perforated ‘slits’ were even more convincing, as if cut into the tombstones like medieval windows to allow sun rays through – and lit from behind. Illusion of course: the light was embedded in the photograph.

Light is key to Bailes’ work and in a 2009 interview, he cited inspiration from James Turrell and Anthony McCall: “These guys harness light in the best possible ways making light and maths the material of their work. I love lights and I love numbers.” With Vessel (2011) the subject/object was obviously photographed, and Bailes laughs at “another analogy for photography and the object within it – which is, of course, light. That’s my reason for the title: the photograph contains the object in the image and the light which enables it to be seen.”

Bailes’ current projects have a feel of McCall but are decidedly less sensual or detached. McCall’s 1970s pieces involve cones of mist passing through light to create what imaginary substance he calls “membranes of light.” Human figures walking amongst them add scale – something absent in Bailes’ work and which adds to the exciting confusion. Vessel (2011) is a photograph of a floating sculpture constructed from pieces of transparent perspex sheets [5 x 10 x 0.5 cm] and glued together. Carefully lit and exploiting the material’s transparency, it reveals the texture of the cloth on which the object is placed and the dust specks on it. Scale, lighting and dimensions are impossible to gauge and he asks himself “How do we use photographs so much to understand our thinking when, like this, it’s not what it seems but it is real!”

There is similarity in László Moholy-Nagy’s 1922 wood-cut, Composition, where two transparent, standing stones float in black, speckled space, their edges outlined by ‘light’ and perspective confirmed by the presence of the bright, clean, reverse ‘L.’   

The trickery and deception involved in Bailes’ work is an irresistible aspect of it. With The Informants’ (2012) strong narrative element, the transparent origami-like construction floating like an undulating sea creature is actually hand-made with folded sheets of the coloured perspex gels used in studio-lighting for (analogue) still-life photography. Their tangible reality and overlapping corners build layers in triangular and other geometric shapes suggestive of paintings and collages by the Constructivist – Supremacists, particularly Malevich, El Lissitsky and Popova who similarly tried to expose the third dimension in the 1920s.

The intimacy between these overlapping gels serves well as a huddle of suspicious, sinister whisperers. Bailes again sees the imperfections here –  the dust and the scratches and wonky shapes  - and sees them as enhancing reality. “The photograph is perfect but the material is imperfect. I enjoy that because it attempts to remove the photograph from reputable perfection and offer some sort of tactile experience.”

The sense of dimension and the “Photography is still not 3-dimensional” discussion seems to link Bailes’ way of thinking to how we currently experience photographs: “I am adapting ideas that the Minimalist sculptors were discussing in relation to photography in the 60s,” he says, “Questions being asked now, ‘When is it Art and when a document of Art?’ came [to me] through looking at pictures which document, and how certain photographers’ approach is to become a work of art in itself: they take on the sensibilities, the characteristics, the concepts, and the conceptual space of that sculpture, of that art work, and it becomes itself”.

Work by performance artists in the conceptual art movement existed only through photographs – and as Bailes points out, many people today experience art and installation through photographs viewed on a web site, not a gallery; “photographs are very much installation pictures.”  That is precisely the case with the exhibits titled The Empiricist and Flags which are also most literal and healthily incongruous.The Empiricist (2011) loops back to Bailes’ earliest works shot at night and out of doors amongst grassy lanes. Scale was never clear. Here, the subject is shockingly ordinary: a log pile. Spotted during a long walk, he shot it full-on, creating flatness and indulging in the patterned whirl of the age rings and circles. He also intervened by picking up a branch and propping it at an angle against the logs. Bisecting the frame was an obvious reference to classical art composition and it broke the original, less interesting design.  However to Bailes, it also revealed a binary coding – the dots and dashes of Morse – in the scene.

The Empiricist (2011) seen in this context highlights the differences between the untidy rough textures of logs and the clarity, polish and calculated perfection of photographs created in his studio. But being a touchable object, the photograph is no less ‘real.’ Similarly created with an existing object, the Polaroid series titled Flags (2012) is converted into an abstract which holds the story. Bailes’ draining them of colour is a brilliant move as colour, of course, is an identifier.  Here, form is the central issue: each waving flag is frozen as an abstract, sculpted shape devoid of its third dimension and flattened by being converted into a photographic print. “I was thinking about the form of the flag and how we think we know what a flag looks like but [it] is constantly re-forming itself. I like that as a metaphor for the photograph. I took lots of pictures with the 5×4 medium format camera but somehow the images from the negatives looked too polished; I wanted to still get through this idea of the wind, the movement, the experience of my being there, all different from my other work – and a bit more human!”

The ultimate image in this exhibition stands out from the collection by occupying the end wall and closing the show. The triptych titled 21-Delta 1965 is named after a trig point code used by surveyors and presented as a line of three tall, monolithic panels standing against the wall’s whiteness, the raw industrial piping and wiring, and each work’s white frames, all of which become part of the installation. Each hand-painted, pale grey panel has black string pinned and stretched between moments like triangulation trig points on a surveyor’s site, creating a map-like effect and a tension between the triangles and spaces and otherwise empty geometry.

Unlike the purely photographic works in this exhibition, 21-Delta 1965 in undeniably, visibly 3-D, confirmed by the physical presence of string lying above the surface of the ‘canvas.’   Bailes explained that part of the piece is a print from a photo negative made of a picture of his studio wall and created for its composition. “The camera was straight on and the material unpretentious, and yet I still feel something that it’s not what I saw in the studio. The transformation of photography does something else to it, elevates it; it becomes much more than it is. Thing of the logs.”

The grey square, suggesting Malevich’s geometric paintings and Bailes’ interest in the Supremacists’ skilful design and use of space and depth, is painted on the wall; this explains the jaggedy edge made “with my bad masking tape skills; I really like the texture and the individuality. And because it’s straddling the border between a drawing and a sculpture and comes very close to the essence of a drawing of simple marks on a surface. But at the same time, it is presented in such a weighted mass with the huge frame and the fact that there are three of them.”

Finishing the journey around the gallery, Bailes summarises, “I’m really interested in the mistakes of the medium, that’s why I am also working optically. Although it takes some control and [I] can understand the process and the tools, there is still a lot I can’t control – and I like that. That’s photography doing what it does.”

As the name implies, Ruff’s ma.r.s shows images of Mars, made using photographs taken by the high-resolution camera on NASA’s Mars Renaissance Orbiter. The large prints show alien yet eerily familiar contours and ravines, some of which are emphasised with 3D colour separation. All is not what it seems. Although the images are made using NASA’s data, Ruff has intervened in their perspective, colour and texture, putting his mark on apparently objective data. By doing so, he argues, he’s only emphasising the interpretation that goes into all images of outer space. Most of the shots of Mars are sent to Earth in black-and-white because colour files are too large, for example; NASA technicians then “process” them to create sensational images which inform us about the universe and NASA’s work in it, and help justify the organisation’s public funding.  

“When I started working on those images I asked NASA why they don’t take colour photographs, and they responded it’s a problem of getting the data back down to earth,” Ruff told me in an interview for the British Journal of Photography. “They have preview images in colour, so I asked ‘Are those images Photoshopped?’ and they said ‘No, they’re not Photoshopped they’re “processed”,’ whatever that means. Even they don’t know the truth in colour – it’s just a kind of ‘probably’. The NASA camera does capture small areas in infrared and RGB, so they use swaps [to extrapolate those areas onto a larger image], or statistics, or what the scientists say, but you cannot be sure that the colours are true. To make those images not look too strange they look at oil paintings, and give them colours that are real or familiar.

“So that’s what I do with the ma.r.s images. Sometimes I’m looking at these swaps and I colour the whole image, but sometimes I say ‘Coloured space is nonsense’ and I do as I want. I work more or less intuitively – I don’t have a vision of Mars. It’s more playing around, experimenting with colours, and what could fit with this kind of surface. The impact craters have to be more dark and sand dunes have to be more shiny, for example.” As Ruff adds in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist published in the exhibition catalogue, the ma.r.s photographs are both realistic and fictional – and the 3D images add an aspect of the absurd “in the fact that you can actually recognise deep relief on the surface of another planet with cheap 3D glasses”.

Ruff’s reference to oil paintings echoes observations made by Dr Elizabeth Kessler, assistant professor of art and liberal studies at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, whose book Picturing the Cosmos: The Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime, will be published in November. Kessler traces the links between Hubble Space Telescope images and the paintings and photographs of the American West made during the Romantic era, pointing out that astronomers choose the colour, contrast and composition of images of space and arguing that their aesthetic decisions are influenced by these early landscapes.

“While astronomers don’t consciously set out to make Hubble images that look like 19th-century landscape paintings and photographs, they do recognise and even encourage the connection,” she stated in an interview with New Scientist published on 30 April 2010. “Press releases often suggest a similarity. The physical processes that formed the Eagle nebula were compared with the erosion of buttes in the American south-west. The Cone nebula was described as a ‘craggy-looking mountain-top of cold gas and dust’.” 

British artist Dan Holdsworth is familiar with both Kessler’s work and the 19th century art and photography she references, and both have fed into his latest series, Transmission: New Remote Earth Views. Showing the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Mount Shasta, Mount St. Helens and Salt Lake City, his images evoke Carleton Watkins’ ground-breaking shots of Yosemite but, as with Ruff’s ma.r.s. series, these images are not what they first seem. Made in collaboration with the United States Geological Survey, these “photographs” are actually digital renditions of laser scans of the Earth’s surface. Close inspection reveals they have the curious plastic feel of video-game landscapes, and Holdsworth has included a stack of printouts in the exhibition, showing the data from which the renditions were extrapolated. 

Like Ruff’s images, and like Watkins’ earlier photographs, Holdsworth’s series reveals both the fantastical universe in which we live and the art (and science) of depicting it. For the Romantics such sights were awe-inspiring because they were Sublime – great beyond human conception, calculation, measurement or imitation. For Holdsworth and Ruff, it seems, some of these limits remain, despite the advances in image technology. 

———————-

Completed in 1820, The Regent’s Canal enjoyed a somewhat restricted period of usage before having its traffic subsumed in the 1840s by the faster and more efficient London railways. By the middle of the nineteenth century much of the canal’s potential cargo was being transported by train, and the canal itself – the hopeful project of notable architect John Nash (responsible for the conservatory at Kew, Royal Opera Arcade and Regent’s Park), with support from Prince regent George IV, from whom the waterway gets its name – was already undergoing an identity crisis. There were several attempts to transform the canal into a railway, with no success and a gunpowder barge explosion at Macclesfield Bridge in 1874, several previous water supply shortages, a badly designed lock and a bout of funding embezzlement, marked a series of despondencies in the canal’s somewhat frustrated history.

It wasn’t until the latter part of the Second World War that traffic was increased on the canal to take pressure off the over-capacity railway system. By the 1960s, commercial traffic had almost completely disappeared, leaving the waterway as predominantly a leisure facility, relished by many Londoners for daytime excursions, boat trips and all manner of unhurried activities. Canals have celebrated a long and successful history, but comparatively The Regent’s Canal, built in the later period of British industrial development and therefore soon-overshadowed by greater technological achievements such as the railway, paled in comparison to the success man-made waterways had relished in England since the 1750s and elsewhere for, in some cases, thousands of years. Indeed, the earliest irrigation canals date back to 4000BC Mesopotamia.

The canal is undoubtedly an invention of ingenious proportions; not just for its speed compared to often badly-surfaced roadways, but also for its relatively quiet, mellifluous nature: canals are places that accommodate both commercial and cultural pursuits simultaneously. It would seem, however, that from one point-of-view The Regent’s Canal was more suited to leisure than commerce, as its difficult history reveals.

Canals have formed the subject matter for a number of notable artworks from the 19^th and 20^th centuries, including Turner’s Chichester Canal (1828), Monet’s The Grand Canal, Venice (1908) and somewhat more exactly related, Algernon Newtons’ The Regent’s Canal, Twilight (1925), which can be found housed in the Government Art Collection along with Coombes’ own work. A number of Romantic and Impressionistic paintings and drawings can be discovered of canals in the last two hundred years of Western art history: they form what one might call a quintessential or even somewhat predictable subject for fine and folk artists alike. The appearance or aesthetic identity of the canal, as quaint and beguiling waterway, is well developed art-historically.

Such subjects are ripe for further exploration by contemporary artists and, as Justin Coombes’ project Halcyon Song shows us, the canal as a place of study for artists is far from dead. Coombes’ series of photographs transform an idle, somewhat clichéd subject into a revitalised and perceptive tale of non-human photographic perspective, iambic pentameters and post-structural complications within the language of photography itself.

The photographs that make up Halcyon Song can be viewed in both book and exhibition form. The works, within the context of a gallery, appear as large, panoramic canalside-views loaded with saturated, resplendent colour, hazy, abstracted surfaces and picturesque views of egg-stealing boaters, balloon-carriers and other bon vivant subjects. The images are accompanied by a series of sonnets written by the artist, which along with the pictures themselves, were created from the viewpoint of a halcyon bird, a genus of kingfisher. Through the eyes of this bird and the medium of photography we are offered a neoteric view – both visual and literary – of The Regent’s Canal as it winds its way through Hackney, collecting rubbish at its banks and playing host to both human and animal visitors alike.

Song of My Womb

Ri-ri! Ri-ri! Ri-ri! Ri-ri!
My halcyon song stretches proud, shrill, long
and my unborn darlings echo the call
in canal
and river and city and sea!

That swirling soup of refuse that I spied
this morning as the lock rose up

reminded me, as all things do in
pregnancy, of my divine insides.

Reader, take these musings lightly,

but see that home looked for when cruising
can shift like silt: nests when floating
can drift away towards cloud sightings
updownupwards, where the mind sings,

from trails of swirling trash where it all begins. 

The Sonnet, a form of poetry written famously by Shakespeare and Milton, has fourteen lines in iambic pentameters. A sequence of sonnets, as is the case with Coombs’ Halcyon Song, often makes up the over-arching narrative of a single poem. A sonnet, not really functioning as a stanza within a poem, feels more akin to a poem within a poem, one might say. In Song of My Womb, the first sonnet in the book the artist produced for this project, we hear the shrill of the halcyon as she flies pregnant over The Regent’s Canal, spying collections of litter in the sullied water. This and other sonnets seem to have a dark humour to them; one line swears nonchalantly while another speaks of ‘lack’ and ‘dismemberment’. Coombes’ use of language is varied, allowing the narrative both a distinctive and vernacular quality throughout: the halcyon is a cynical bird in this poem, one who passes comment on her everyday experiences of the waterway, without restraint or any particular esteem for the presence of humans on the canalside. The poems offer a descriptive accompaniment to the large photographs, allowing the viewer a chance to put himself or herself in the position of this kingfisher as she sarcastically wings her way about the waterway.

Coombes replaces his own position as photographer with the view of the kingfisher, seeking to understand photography as a way of capturing the world from the point-of-view of an existence outside of human consciousness: instead, the halcyon appears to be photographically documenting the canal through her own unique gaze. Here, photography becomes Orwellian fiction; these images offer an insight into a particular character in a fabled, anomalous world that exists as metaphor for our own. As the artist states, ‘I’m interested in the idea of “seeing lyrically”… I limited myself to one “voice” and one poetic form: the sonnet.’ This is essentially a way of conceptualising the act of photographing in a manner that does not, despite surface-level appearance, appear as realist; even the bird’s skewered viewpoints and poetic descriptions of the canal are littered with both visual and literary abstractions. For Coombes, the language of photography is a fictional one. In this sense reality as it appears in the artist’s photographs, could be seen to provide a somewhat fabled quality, which has therefore led Coombes to consider photography as necessarily fictive, compounded by its relationship to poetry and narrative in these works.

As opposed to accurate representations, photographs could be described as interpretations of the world at various subjective distances from it. Often, the gap between what is thought or even seen by a photographer, and what is actually captured by his or her photographs, is distant – a space shrouded in complex layers of difference, intentionality and interpretation. Like verbal or written languages, the visual language of photography is often allegorical, metaphorical, or symbolic. Photographic images allude to so much more than just simply what is pictured at a given moment, which is precisely why, tied-up in mystery and illusion, photographs so often enthral.

Halcyon Song would suggest Coombes seems to recognise that within the history of photography theory, the language of photography has moved from describing photographs as realist or mimetic, to understanding that there is an identifiable and intriguing space between the photograph itself, and the thing it depicts (its referent). After developments in linguistics and philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s, artists and writers such as Victor Burgin and Umberto Eco described photographs and their difference to the world with vehement interest and concentration. Specifically, the articulable distinction between a photograph and the world is a clarity offered to photography by semiotics.

Due to these developments in theory, the practice of photography has changed too. Photography has now become a complex art form that cannot help but “think” its way around aesthetic, cultural and political phenomena. In fact, the medium is somewhat bound to thinking itself. Photography doesn’t just simply show things any longer, devoid of analogy or interpretation, it often explains how it shows and why it shows. By representing rather than accurately depicting, photography trades places with various things in the world in order to describe them. There are myriad ways it can do this, but perhaps they all boil down to the unfenced relationship between four essential elements that make up the language of photography: a human subject, a camera, a photograph and the world around them (the key here being that a photograph and the world are not one in the same thing; their difference must be acknowledged).

There are a great number of ways in which photography can change depending on the emphasis placed on one or more of these four elements. Photography can be cameraless, an object might be alone within an image – enlarged and hyperbolic – or there might be many objects simultaneously in view. Indeed, an entire landscape can be panoramically captured, or a photograph can be completely abstract. Each one placing concomitant demands on the viewer, these variations effect the extent to which a photograph can be seen as “different” from the thing it depicts.

What if another scenario, for example an intrigued, voyeuristic animal were to anthropomorphically replace a human photographer? What happens to the language of photography when one of its four standard elements is replaced, or removed altogether? In Coombes’ Halcyon Song, a bird’s point-of-view replaces the traditional human viewpoint; the halcyon seemingly takes on the ability to photographically document what she sees. Therefore, a strange new photographic language is constructed. As two separate but interrelating forms, the photographs and the sonnets are poetic representations of a world created by the halcyon bird. The combination of the images and the halcyon’s poetry forms a strange metaphor for seeing photographically. This metaphor, and thusly the work itself, states that seeing in this way is necessarily poetic, fictional even. As Coombes states ‘I am fascinated by the apparent irreducibility of one form from the other. Where the combination works best, there is a kind of tension that keeps the whole thing alive.’ This tension is the observable difference between the world we think we recognise in the photographs and the actual photographs themselves as photo-poetic descriptions.

In what way can the difference between the four elements (bird, camera, photograph and world) that make up the photographic language in Halcyon Song be described? This difference is best articulated by considering the idea of whose gaze we are seeing at work within the images themselves. The language these photographs speak in is an unusual one where traditional conceptions of the gaze are concerned. We are seeing the bird seeing; or rather, we are seeing as if we were the halcyon herself. Coombes successfully replaces the more traditional human-centric gaze with an anthropomorphic one; these works show a kind of intra-diegetic gaze with the exception that the point-of-view shot of the bird looking at the world does not show the bird itself precisely because the bird’s point-of-view becomes our own. When looking at these images we become a bird, or to put it somewhat philosophically, we “become animal”. In this sense Halcyon Song offers a literal take on Derrida’s idea of “the animal that therefore I am”. ‘As with every bottomless gaze, as with the eyes of the other, the gaze called animal offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man, that is to say the bordercrossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself.’

Coombes’ project can be seen to comment on the end point of being human which, within the specific context of photography, would surely describe the limit of the human gaze in photographic seeing. This mixture of theoretical basis and aesthetic accessibility makes for a novel, and at points incredibly interesting, way of thinking through what it means to “see” or “gaze” photographically, from a truly atypical point-of-view. 

- Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending, London: Vintage Books, 2012, p.36

The otherworldliness that Barnes’ central character experiences in this brief but memorable moment on the banks of the River Severn, concerns the sudden change in the direction of the water as the periodic and infamous tidal surge makes its presence felt disturbing the regular order of things. One moment water is flowing one way, the next it is flowing in reverse and at several feet higher, crashing over the riverbanks.

For those who have witnessed the Bore, it is indeed memorable because for many it confounds their ability to truly make sense of what is happening with the abstractions of tides, river-bed topography, wind speed and direction and the sheer volume of water entering the Bristol Channel. As a predictable phenomenon in the annual tidal calendar, the Bore is the result of a extra surge of water within a comparatively narrow channel occurring around high tides and, most prominently, in the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. The resulting rise in river level is between 2 and 6 feet, as it moves from the mouth of the river around Sharpness where it forms, following the inland route of the Severn as it winds through the Gloucestershire countryside and dissipates at the weir near Maisemore.

Installed across two floors of Arnolfini’s distinctive dockside building, Sophy Rickett’s exhibition in two parts, provides the viewer with an encounter with the Severn Bore that adds to its unfathomable character. To The River uses the rhetorics of scientific study in parallel with an insight into the social dimension of the Bore to offer another way of understanding this curious and beguiling event in nature. The exhibition is the result of a two-year collaboration between the artist, Arnolfini, film producer Elena Hill and ArtSway, and consists of a multi-screen video installation downstairs and framed prints in a gallery on the first floor. The combination of video installation with both photographs, text and ephemera is at times a deliberately awkward one, where romanticism and personal testimony are set against documents and bookish explanations of the Bore as simple matters of physics and geology.

In this configuration, the Bore lends itself to introspection, to curiosity, to pilgrimage and possibly to a sense of awe and the sublime when understood in its natural fullness. It is the allure of the wave, its pending arrival, the fleeting spectacle and its emotional resonance, that To The River reflects upon more specifically. Here Rickett presents us with a glimpse into the metaphorical Bore associated with the lives of people gathered to witness its passing. Undertaken with the patina of anthropological fieldwork and a gesture towards ‘the archive’, data gathering, classification, truth and linearity are not necessarily rigid or stable categories in this search for an authoritative and over-arching narrative. Instead, Rickett opts for a more mutable and psychological currency relating to the significance of the Bore.

Sophy Rickett’s previous work has explored the otherness of landscape through pictorial conventions that similarly confound viewers’ expectations. As a recurring motif, the nocturnal world has been transformed by an ambiguous scale of things bathed in viscous and lurid luminescence, that opens onto a darker nature. In To The River a similar disturbance takes place; filming at night with stills that refer mostly to the river by day. The fragmentary aesthetic present in the video installation is again mirrored in the narrative power of fragments in the second part of the installation– audio snippets of overheard conversations, camera glimpses of faces in crowds, postcards, book plates and diagrams carefully torn from the spine, printed words cut from the page, as if in this selection of specimens the wave can be contained, quantified, known. In this collection of commentaries, the video plays a more seductive and melancholic role, where the prints work in opposition as seemingly clinical and archival forms of evidence.

The main installation consists of three screens set at three different points in the large downstairs gallery, two on separate walls, one spanning a corner. The screens are of equal size and are much smaller than the surrounding walls. Spatially things are made more disconnected by the use of surround sound from different audio tracks relayed at several points in the ceiling. The viewer moves between recorded conversational fragments collected from the banks of the river, to visual equivalents. The experience is not unfamiliar from being in crowd, words and stories catch you and take you with them for a while before other distractions impose themselves.

As an immersive environment and one whose commentaries crave intimacy, the pacing and scale of this installation is thoughtful. Hopes of seeing the Bore are dashed and the (mental) image is concentrated into the soundtrack of its approach and passing, with dark footage of spectators looking out into the river and the fleeting verbal commentaries. These conversational fragments are important and contain brief accounts of lost loves, the death of a parent, the sighting of dead animals in the river, expressions of boredom, domestic tales both intimate and perfunctory, cursory discussions of the Bore, and perhaps most pointedly, an account of a display case of butterflies whose decay is accelerated by the ingress of air.  These amount to frames of reference that mark an erratic emotional scale linked to the Bore from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Ephemerality and the ensuing loss is keenly felt in keeping the Bore itself out frame beyond its sound, but a sense of its actual form can be seen, in part, elsewhere in the exhibition.

The filming took place in and around Minsterworth, a prime and popular observation point. The crowds are lit from behind and above, lending their faces and occasional discernible features an ethereal, spectral appearance. On the banks of river at night, a thick sense of time underpins the expectancy for the arrival of the Bore, a moment that has a contingency of up to 30 minutes  depending on prevailing weather conditions. In the installation, we hear a mix of accents that perhaps superficially demarcate a territory between town and country. The video installation is not without associations to films that use arcane, archaic and esoteric ideas of the countryside, where people are mysteriously drawn to an unseen power in the land, such as the group that gather nightly at the water tower in Peter Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers (1988), or the binding pagan force found in the small community on Summerisle in Robin Hardy’s cult film The Wicker Man (1973). 

In what can be seen as the second part of the exhibition on the first floor, a small room contains framed items culled mostly from books. These book plates can be seen as a more clinical mirror to the brooding romantic landscape evoked in the film. Here the Bore and surrounding countryside are contained, defined by the languages of maths and physics played out through photographs made on location or of Bore physics simulated in the laboratory. And, it is this form of analysis that the film actively works against, introducing unseen elements associated with social and pyschological landscapes. The book plates then embody aspects of modernity, of knowledge and progress in collision with more intimate and imaginary accounts connected with place.

The second section with its allusions to ‘the archive’ opens with a personal letter to the artist, written in an elegant hand, that expresses a reluctance at having not seen her in the course of further research for the project, noting that ‘our paths may never cross again’. Alongside this hangs a portrait of an elderly gentleman who wrote the letter and for whom Bore watching has, we assumed, figured in his life for decades. The sentiment and loss conveyed by both the letter and the tender portrait that accompanies it are evident as expressions of a particular attachment to the social dimensions that converge around the Bore.

Other traces of the social connection are illustrated in the case of framed book plates that include transcribed quotes taken from sound recording in situ. The books from which the plates are taken include F W Rowbotham’s The Severn Bore (1964), R A R Tricker’s Bores, Breakers, Wakes and Waves (1964), V Cornish’s Ocean Waves and Kindred Phenomenon (1934), and J Lighthill’s Waves in Fluids (1971); all functional but in their new context possessing an engimatic even nostalgic charm as half-tone illustrations and letterpress diagrams. The plates supply visual evidence which is countered by transcripts of conversations, such as one fragment concerning a disagreement between neighbours over a plum tree that was subsequently cut down; a journey into alcohol dependency; the sighting of a dead fox in the tide line of the river ‘it looked so beautiful, completely peaceful and perfect…’. These transcribed fragments are printed underneath those monochrome photographic studies as expositions of the physics of the Bore and the surrounding landscape. Rickett makes these differences play off against each other and they inhabit each others’ value systems where the romantic is for a moment checked against the matter of fact analysis of the tidal waters, and the melancholia of some of the text is constrained. It is as if the juxtaposition, in a gesture towards the Bore itself, momentarily reverses the expected flow and currency of words and images, a fleeting disturbance.

Perhaps it is the ‘wrongness’ of the Bore that best illustrates why people come to see it.  That is, to place themselves in proximity to an event that is so outside of their everyday lives, to stand close to something that is unfathomable, to feel both challenged and reassured by its passing. As an experiment, To The River offers a fascinating poetics of the Bore as a means to articulating its affect, to think about time, its accretion and dissipation, and the residues of memory. It is a piece full of sadness but also of hope. It might be perceived as the inevitable failure of scientific ordering principles in favour of a romantic and allegorical encounter with Nature, but this is too indulgent and simplistic for what is being offered here. To The River is a collection of very human stories that touch upon mistakes, failure, desire, loss, ambivalence and resentment; it is a prolonged encounter with the momentary reversal in the flow of things, allowing for a symbolic occupation of the past to potentially shape a different future.

Russell Roberts is Reader in Photography at the European Centre for Photographic Research at University of Wales, Newport. He has curated many exhibitions both nationally and internationally and is currently working with The Photographers’ Gallery, London, on an exhibition for 2013 based on the archive of Mass Observation.

Having spent several years working in Northern Ireland, Sylvia Grace Borda is neither a detached bystander of the landscape, nor an embedded citizen. Working within this semi-immersion, the Vancouver-born artist’s photographic series, Churches, uproots and shapes a conceptual strand embedded in Northern Ireland’s reality.

Surveying the modernist architectural legacy of Northern Ireland’s churches, the artist compiles and condenses a previously unrecorded facet of the country’s architecture and society. Having originally set out to find terms that could underpin Northern Ireland’s definition, Borda found that the country’s ambiguities and contradictions made this an impossible endeavour[i]. Instead, Churches takes a lateral and expanded look at religion’s spatial and societal impact. There is no attempt to firmly pinpoint, and no suppositional subtext. 

It goes without saying that the photographic definition of Northern Ireland has a rich journalistic history. Being aware of the discrepancies in how the country is viewed locally and internationally, and conscious of how questioned and propagandised its media portrayal has been in the past, the artist sought to “show the divide without defining it”, drawing a diagonal line across Northern Ireland’s prescribed political fundamentals. As a result, for an audience familiar with Northern Ireland only in its media terms, these aesthetically grouped bastions of faith have a certain placidity – above all the pregnancy of these buildings in terms of faith and politics, they are marked simply by their architecture.[ii]

As a line of enquiry and representation that holds the act of observation at its crux, Borda was cautious of the work’s capacity to turn into a documentary project. Emphasis on the information of the subjects could easily obscure the work’s deeper premise, making the work more about the nature of the singular buildings than the conceptual terms behind this typology. As a result, the specific and indistinct appear to be in a finely tuned balance in Churches. Whilst conceptually dependent on their Northern Irish context, there is no information of denomination or location – in effect, the churches themselves become “spaceless”, background to the question of its stated and unstated definitions and portrayal.[iii]

The legacy of photojournalism has defined the work of Northern Irish photographers such as Donovan Wylie and Paul Seawright, shaping an aesthetic of detached observation and visual ambiguity that has become almost canonical. With their distant perspectives and heavy geometry, some of the images of Churches do carry similar formal qualities. Yet Churches operates within a different framework, focusing on creating a compilation of images rather than individual shots. “As single or individual images, if you were to look or handle them, their strength isn’t in their singularity”, Borda says. “It’s in their larger composite, or their relational experience of being one of one hundred.” Whilst Northern Irish photographic art has often played upon its inevitable reference of photojournalism, Churches internal and external relationships combine and contrast, working within and around the stated terms of its definition.

The visual variety within Churches is huge. Simple boxlike constructions contrast with vast, often oddly futuristic angular forms, which appear to be more like monuments than buildings. Whilst the modernist ethos of form following function aligns with the pragmatism of the national psyche, the overt non-traditionalism of the larger buildings is a challenging aesthetic that, in general, has sat slightly uneasily in the collective consciousness of Northern Ireland.

Yet these churches remain reflective of their community above all else, before any larger discussions of aesthetics.[iv] As architectural historian David Brett observed, the churches themselves are “almost like a folk art”,[v] and their differences demonstrate the diverse needs of the communities they serve.

This is mirrored in the act and spatial consolidation of the photography: whilst visually representing single scenes, each image of Churches became a manifestation of its surrounding area. Borda had originally set out to create a record in a similar vein to the Bechers, to centre frame and be a set number of feet away from the buildings. However, when the spatial layout of the landscape did not allow for this, the artist adopted a more flexible aesthetic when taking the images, resulting in a “potentially motley group” of photos.

Whilst embracing a more fluid approach to each image’s formal qualities, “staging” is a key component of Borda’s practice, and in Churches is most prevalent in how this collection is consolidated. Coming to the Table is composed of sixteen souvenir plates, each bearing a church and laid across a long black table in a darkened room. 

Borda avoided the more conventional photographic form of large printed images, as to do so would “emphasise the faith” of the churches above their other contexts. By instead reducing the size of these buildings, there is limited depth for reading the images individually. Focus is instead shifted to their relationship to one another, as well as the physicality of the ceramic form; for these objects “in a theoretical way, represent a fragile state.” In an effort to show the images in a non-hierarchal format, the artist has opened the record into something more interactive than the printed photograph, where images can be handled, rearranged and cross-referenced in a forum without denominations or locations. Transformed into a familiar domestic form, viewers can sit across from one another and potentially discuss the piece. 

Whilst Coming to the Table encourages a prolonged engagement with the photographs, the slideshow that accompanies it takes the opposite approach, slipping through one hundred of the collected images in a continuous rotation. “The slide loop is compositionally edited so that things move across the image plane,” Borda says. “The images constantly pass and don’t give you the privilege to stare at them too long. You almost have to watch the film loop four or five times so that you see traces of things.” Each slide is fleeting, as if the viewer is “driving by”. With no discernible beginning or end and a constantly changing locus, it’s a spliced journey. In reality, the details of the physical landscape are constantly shifting: each scene’s visual markers move at different paces, to some degree reflecting and developing a changing relationship with space and society.

Each photo marks the present’s position with the past, and so, too, will the aging of this collection shift the nature of Churches’ images. Moving from a purely conceptual record to an archival point of reference as time goes on, the photos gradually become a part of cultural affluence that they represent.[vi] Churches shall enter into the same dialogue with time as these buildings, and as such, the gap between the architecture and their representation will progressively close.

Sylvia Grace Borda is an artist and Research Associate at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver. She has studied Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia (MFA) and Media & Photography at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (BFA).
 
Solo exhibitions include Belfast Exposed (2012), Cameras and Watercolour Sunsets, CSA Space Vancouver (2010); A Holiday in Glenrothes, Royal Institute of Architects Scotland Gallery, Edinburgh (2008); EK Modernism, CSA Space (2007); New Town Passages, EKAC Galleries, Glasgow (2006); Minimalist Portraits, SAW Art Gallery, Ottawa (2005); and Every Bus Stop in Surrey, BC Surrey Art Gallery, Canada (2005).  
 
Sylvia Grace Borda has received a number of public grants and awards including City of Richmond Public Art Commssion: No.4 Pump Station (2010-11), Cultural Capital of Canada Artist status award in combination with Cultural Olympiad project status for the Winter Olympics (2008-10), the Innovation Award, The Lighthouse Gallery Glasgow (2006), and the Urban Culture Award (through the Millennium Commission, Cities of Culture Liverpool) for 2005-07.

Dorothy Hunter is an art writer and artist based in Northern Ireland