2005

Real versus visible

Photography is only a technique. Inherently it has no value without the personal and cultural contexts of the photographer and viewer. I introduce the works in this exhibition with consideration of those inextricable elements of time and photographic process.

Judy Anderson layers moments via digital manipulation, a process that enables her to subjectively ‘paint’ and collage her photographic images together. In this ‘fragmented narrative’, ideas and impressions are communicated through colour and imagery such as flowers and netting, and suggestive folds in material and pattern. The idea of editing contributes strongly to a reading of this work. Through selection, and the process of layering digital images, we are reminded of drawing and erasure. The paint is peeled back on the past, the fluid and the intuitive. It is an abstract idea removed from the material world. We are denied the sumptuousness of surface, but we become enveloped in an image and an idea of the large and erotic feminine.

Holly Schulte on the other hand explores the relationship of time and the feminine from a perspective of fantasy, narrative and photographic sequence. It is only a camera’s moment, but the construction engages with the idea of the body and change. The ripe, youthful body contrasts that which will befall her. Autumn leaves float ominously. The lack of gravity engaged by the rotating and sequencing of photographs in this work, reinforces the dialogue of a space that attempts to engage metaphoric time.

Photos stem from our relationships with things we cannot see as well as places, people and things. Julie Stephenson’s study of water severed from its context of the dynamic, explores the water/air vortex solidified as two dimensional image. Photography presents a particular interpretation of the world, and it is our own construction of the world that we see. As a measurement apparatus, photography challenges our normal vision and promotes a particular philosophical viewpoint which in turn modifies our understanding of the material world. Ironically photography expands our notion of reality, by confusing the dictum that ”seeing is believing”. The water vortex is transformed into metaphoric colour and form. The photographed water vortexes are such a contradiction of their true nature, we can only read them as allegories of photographic vision, and perhaps of our own desire for permanence in a transient world.

Tai Spuyrt, through photographic apparatus makes visible that which we cannot see. The night sky becomes blue and the artificial colours of light become exaggerated in the long exposures at night of desolate and urban industrial spaces. Material reality as represented by the single viewpoint is stationery, one eyed and self centered. We are aware we are outside the frame looking in. Spuyt has photographed and manufactured empty, barren, dehumanized spaces.

Lani Seligman ‘explores the sensation of being adrift’ in cool empty spaces. Time, in her work although captured in a split second, is heavy with the notion of endless duration. These photographs do not suggest the beginning or the end to an event. They capture a continuum, a limbo of suspended space. Seligman’s work emphasizes the floating nature of the photograph, unfastened and removed as it is, from a particular place and time.

Potential rationale explanations for these photographs multiply, finally evaporating, and the attempt for significance subsides into a space of meaninglessness and emptiness. Fortunately, this directs us to deeper, more profound experience. Time in Seligman’s photographs is locked together with place in an endless floating dislocation, providing the viewer with a new space for contemplation and meditation.

Marian Drew
Artist/Senior Lecturer in Photography, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University.