2006

Exactly what are we looking at?

Each of these four photographers, selected by the QCP for separate, simultaneous exhibitions, presents a world of eerie unreality. In the era of digital photography, the old article of faith “the camera never lies” is being replaced with a more skeptical reluctance to trust photographs. The ability to manipulate an image at will, however, has always been one of the ways in which photographers could define themselves as artists. Technology has simply increased the possibilities for doing this, which doesn’t really change the role of the photographer, but it does have an effect on the responses of the viewer. We can no longer be sure exactly what we’re looking at. We wonder how much of it is actually fabricated illusion. Or as Meryl Streep asked with a theatrically thick Polish accent in the movie Sophie’s Choice, “What is the truth?”

With the exception of Virginia Miller, the artists have not digitally invented their subjects. They photographed what was really there, although the things Paul Adair photographed were only there because he manufactured them. He describes his Decoy series as ‘a parody of photographic verisimilitude’. He heightens artifice by physically constructing his camera subjects and then photographing them. More significant than the reality/illusion game this generates, is the examination of human responses to photography, and the desire to be seduced by it. People want to believe in the perfection achieved on celluloid or in silicone chips. The unblemished, manufactured surfaces and generic forms in his images suggest a corporate- constructed Better World. This has almost nothing to do with the camera subjects, which are very down-to-earth in a rough, blokey, outdoorsy sort of way; it is Adair’s styling and photographic technique that puts a vaguely sinister emphasis on the seemingly irresistible appeal of bland artificiality.

Virginia Miller creates visual paradoxes by superimposing two sets of imagery, and two methods of creating artificial, pictorial space. She photographed fluffy clouds from an aeroplane window, then digitally added white cardboard fast food cartons, which float in the middle distance. Unfolded, these little white boxes are as flat as the surface of a photograph. When assembled, their crisp geometry provides a quick demonstration of how linear perspective can turn two dimensions into three. The depth of the background is produced by aerial perspective, traditionally used to create space in landscape pictures. Miller has used it in the most literal sense, by photographing air. The complex spatial dialectics she explores are enlivened by the absurd improbability of seeing a takeaway food container at an altitude of 20,000 metres.

Absurdity is central to the bizarre scenes in exquisitely designed animal enclosures recorded by Christina Lauer. She photographed various zoos in Germany that are so blank and sterile that the viewer assumes the animals must be display dummies. Lauer is conscious of the increasing alienation of human life from nature, but these photographs present an even more unsettling vision of the same fate inflicted on animals. This is the white box gallery aesthetic applied to the study of living things, a curious inversion of the experience of seeing hyper real figure sculptures in an art museum, and the absolute opposite of nature photography.

During a residency in Beijing in February 2005 Izabela Pluta photographed not-yet completed buildings of fresh sludge-grey cement, set in desolate land of the same colour, or surrounded by snow, beneath leaden skies. Like the uniformly stony forms in all-grey paintings by René Magritte, the architecture in Pluta’s photographs is recognisable but unreal; imaginary, dislocated, spaces, still and silent as a tomb. Creating this sense of frozen time with subject matter that only exists because of the incredible pace of development in China is remarkable, but in photographs anything is possible.

Timothy Morrell