All twelve of these pictures depict the same subject and setting comprising a white satin dress found submerged in the river. The dress was subsequently retrieved, then put back into the water and photographed. This scenario was repeated serially and periodically over a four year period. The total number of photographs is in the several hundreds, the last of which was taken about five years ago. Time has allowed me distance and space to mull things over.
In 2020 a selection of 36 digital image files was edited and printed in booklet form accompanied by a web-based virtual gallery but none were exhibited. This selection of 12 pictures was made specifically for this exhibition and scaled in number and size to fit within the brick store gallery.
The process of choosing and digitally developing a presentable printed picture from the latent imagery encoded in an SD card file has been variously time consuming, tediously repetitive and occasionally revelatory; fortunately. It provided an opportunity to find hitherto unseen or forgotten aspects of the original mise en scene. I tried to strike a balance between photographic fidelity and pictorial fancy by keeping to the perspectives and configuration of shapes just as the camera received them, while allowing myself to optimise colour value and in so doing, draw out some of those hitherto undiscovered or over-looked aspects. The outcome is undeniably and flagrantly pictorialist photographs. However, nothing was layered, montaged or digitally painted in. What you see is, in one factual sense, all there was to be seen. But they have been augmented by a series of mediations, starting with the refractive powers of both river water and camera glass, followed-up by the encryptions of camera chips and concluding in the mathematical algorithmic calculus of the desktop computer . All of which I tried to carefully cultivate in the course of these developments. Some were cropped and some, as I think can be seen, have been reorientated; that which was the base-line for the camera is now located alternatively left, right or even above.
I hope they invoke a similar perceptual playfulness in the spectator.
Interestingly, the etymology of the word ‘interpret’ points towards the idea of mediation and exchange. It derives from the Latin interpres, formed from inter- (‘between’) and a root associated with pretium (‘price’ or ‘value’). Historically, an interpres was a commercial go-between: a broker or negotiator who stood between two parties to establish the value of goods being traded. Interpretation, then, can be understood not simply as the act of explaining or assigning meaning, but also as two-way negotiation of value.
Contemporary vision science and psychology is replete with accounts suggesting that both our everyday visual perception and our more purposeful looking into pictures is fundamentally transactional; we give as good as we get. I have come to believe that looking at pictures is something we do; an act of almost complicit make-perceive*.
Now it’s over to you. There is no need for an interceding curatorial broker. It’s all there in the looks exchanged between you and the pictures. What you see in them is what you get from them.
What is your take-away?
*Briscoe, Robert (2018). Superimposed Mental Imagery: On the Uses of Make-Perceive. In Fiona Macpherson & Fabian Dorsch, Perceptual Imagination and Perceptual Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 161-185.
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