2006

Revealing concealment

All images made by artists have the capacity for concealment as well as revelation. This dual role is particularly significant in the case of photography, because the simplistic notion of that art form suggests that the main control that the photographer has over the image is choosing what not to photograph. According to the point-and-press method the photographer can only determine what will be excluded from the image; what appears in the viewfinder is supposedly up to nature.

In reality, not even the most rudimentary home snapshots work that way, but the decision to leave certain things out, or make them unclear, is an important aspect of photography. Severe cropping and distortion of the image, or photographing subjects that seem almost blank and devoid of information, may encourage the viewer to extrapolate or imagine something that is not fully revealed.

Concealment plays a part in each of these five small exhibitions. All are by Brisbane artists, although Annie Hogan now works and teaches in the U.S. Photographing almost featureless interior architecture is the basis of Hogan’s practice. Her most recent series of works, ESP, takes its name from the acronym for the Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, which in 1829 pioneered the idea of subjecting prisoners to solitary confinement in their own cells. Hogan’s photographs of the Penitentiary’s cells evoke a dark, silent existence, cut off from all interaction with the world. She points out that ESP is also the acronym for extra sensory perception, which is an ironical coincidence given that sensory deprivation would have become the basis of the ESP inmates’ lives.

Melissa Johnson has written that the photography of June Indrefjord generates a sense of something hidden, comparable to a glimpse through a bedroom door that allows viewers to see only what the artist wants them to see. Small details of information are provided like clues. The things that Indrefjord photographs are intensely personal; the adornments of private space. This is particularly true of the re-photographed photographs that would clearly have had important significance to their original owners, but which become more remote and mysterious through the additional layer of distance created when they become camera subjects themselves.

The photographs that Terry Young has re-photographed were taken by his father. Projecting slides of the exotic East onto a suburban living room wall was once a form of entertainment provided by tourists when they came home. Young has made his own version of this souvenir of the Big Trip as a way of trying to regain a sense of his father’s history. The results show the impossibility of really sharing someone else’s experiences. The slides (some of them hauntingly beautiful) are projected onto irregular surfaces that disrupt and distort the images. Young Jnr’s photographs have a second-generation loss of image quality, so that a slightly darker and blurrier view is created, emphasizing the fact that the past always remains hidden. When recreated, it becomes something else.

The fragments of text in Karen Milder’s photographs are often difficult to read. Many of the compositions are similarly ambiguous, involving the reflections and superimpositions caused by photographing through plate glass. Sometimes the layering of partial or obscure detail is comparable to a collage in which relationships are formed between disparate components to generate unexpected meanings. This treatment also dissolves coherent space, making the camera subjects somewhat abstract.

Ryan Humphries’ Obscura Vision is an exhibition of entirely abstract photographs taken from nature without using a lens. Because there is no focus at all, the smoothly modulated colour resembles the controlled play of light on featureless walls in the work of American artists Dan Flavin and James Turrell. Their environments of light often create a poetic spatial ambiguity, and Humphries generates a far greater ambiguity by removing even the frame of reference provided by architecture. It is photography reduced to its purest elements of colour and light.

Timothy Morrell