The photography practice including material enquiry, techniques, mechanisms and processes and also propositions, agendas, intentions, methodologies, strategies and habits has already been outlined in the Research and Enquiry Reflective Statement.
Photogram
A new area of tension within the practice is that of using the colour darkroom to make images without the use of or mediation through a camera.
A particular area of debate within the context of making surrounds a tension between searching for “happy accidents” in image making and being more rigorous with procedures and processes and documentation in order to use successes (as according to my value judgments) as learning processes. This area has not yet been resolved.
Perfect "happy accident"
This resonates with what James Turrell writes in Theories and Documents in Contemporary Art by Stiles and Selz: “I am more interested in posing questions than in answering them. I also think artists are more practical than scientists in that when they find something that works and is useful, they’re quite willing to use it without necessarily knowing why or how it works.”
Tensions within the practice concerning the way photography is used within the practice, primarily in an abstract way as an image making tool to achieve a successful image with impact according to my value judgments with little regard as to the technical correctness, documentary or representative nature of photography, are exposed in further posts.
Concerns within photography as a medium within fine art itself, are highlighted in the following quotes and comments.
Photograph
Susan Sontag writes in On Photography: “Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.”
In Where is the Photograph edited by David Green, it is commented: “Photographs, therefore, are not just indexical because light happened to be recorded on a piece of photosensitive film, but because, first and foremost, they were taken. The very act of photography, as a kind of performative gesture which points to an event in the world, as a form of designation that draws reality into the image field, is thus itself a form of indexicality.”
Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucinda: “A specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents), or at least it is not immediately or generally distinguished from its referent (as is the case for every other image, encumbered – from the start, and because of its status – by the way in which the object is simulated.)”
In Practices of Looking by Sturken and Cartwright, they comment on digital photography: “With the digital camera, then, we have the quality of reproducibility built into the form in a way that eliminates dependence on a single original medium (the negative) from which the work derives. For this reason, we can say that the digital photograph breaks even further than did the analogue photograph from the ideology of the original work. Not only is the digital photograph highly reproducible, but also reproducibility itself is a deeply inherent characteristic of digital technology.”
Digital image (with a technology-based referent)
Art Now 2 on Thomas Ruff, writes: “Every photograph is already a construct; the product of given technical conditions, and of the reproduction of image types and social conventions of perception. Thomas Ruff turns away from the concept of illustrating reality in his photographic works. Often conceived as a series, he bases them not only on his own photographs but on other people’s material as well.”
