… The world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all distinguishes the essence of the modern age
In 1977 the German philosopher Heidegger published a set of essays about the relationship between technology and society. Technology, he argued, should not be thought of as a mechanical apparatus, but rather as a more profound and distinctive way in which mankind engages with the natural world. Technology is a specific attitude that is inscribed in all the tools and forms of organisation that we have developed and that can be characterised by a profound instrumentalism. This attitude, powerful and productive but also dangerous and alienating, involves a form of estrangement from nature; it involves a way of ‘enframing’ it and setting it a distance from ourselves. Much of his writing was engaged with how to think the terms of that distance. He argued that modernity could indeed be thought of as the ‘age of the world picture’, a period in which our very understanding of ourselves was conjured through a positioning of ourselves in relationship to the ‘pictureness’ of the world. Heidegger’s idea of the ‘picture’ was a peculiarly open one: we shouldn’t think, he argued, of the picture as being similar to a copy of reality, like a painting: ‘the world picture … does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture’. Instead the relationship between us and the world is characterised by the nature of our desires, intentions and institutions. We are, literally ‘in the picture’, constituted by this pictured world even as we create it.
Photographic technologies are some of the most powerful technologies of the modern period. It is difficult now to imagine what it would be like to live in a culture in which these forms of visualisation did not exist: we picture ourselves and see ourselves pictured every day. But we might borrow from Heidegger the observation that the way in which we think about those pictures needs to be open to the complexity of their relationships to our desires, our politics, and our institutions. Photographs are not paintings, and though we may sometimes look at them as though they were, imagine them to be distinctive representational copies of the world (and indeed imagine them to be products of the photographer’s own creative imagination and vision), it seems that photographs in fact ‘put us into the picture’ in more complicated ways.
For a long time the study of photography was dominated by structuralism and the study of semiotics, by the analysis of the binary relationship: sign/referent. In more recent times we might replace this relationship with the more open one: photography/world. And that slash between these two opposed terms might represent all the different ways through which photography is productive of our relationship to the world and helps to put it into the picture for us: the performative, the archival, the political, the symbolic. These are just a few of the wide range of strategic options through which we can use photography to bring ourselves into a new relationship with the world picture.
These observations can help us to make sense of the extraordinary diversity of approaches to photography represented by the work in this exhibition. The ways in which we present our work in the gallery are fundamental to the idea of a serious practice; they provide us with ways of trapping the gaze, concentrating attention, opening up a space of reflection about the work. But increasingly that reflection must ponder not upon the image itself but upon the way in which it came into that place, and on the meaning of the boundary between the work and the world that is represented by the frame itself.
Many of the photographers exhibiting here work with photography as much as through it. They collect found photographs, produce archives, trawl the internet, scavenge documents; they take snapshots, procure studio portraits, re-stage events, Photoshop and overlay the image. Photography is configured less as a medium and more as field of practice through which our relationship to the visual can be explored.
Three of the photographers specifically consider the way in which photography intersects with architecture to frame the subject in the world: Mu-Tien Ho reconstructs observed tableaux through the street windows of English houses; Sharon O’Neill celebrates the modernist vision of a celebrated English architect and explores its relationship to the everyday reality of the occupants of one of his apartment blocks; Andrew Pengilly subtly reconfigures the modernist relationship between interior and exterior, nature and culture, in his complex pictorial renditions of a 1930s architect-designed house.
Others have looked beyond the building, examining the boundaries of the pictorialist genres of landscape through which we generally ‘picture’ our world: Kayung Lai has created a vision of the English landscape as an orientalist horticultural fantasy overlooked by brooding melancholic pagodas; Yuxi Si, arriving in England from Beijing, has presented a meditation on grass in public parks. James Finlay has conjured with the problem of how photography can begin to engage with the invisible political boundary between England and Scotland and all the historical tensions that boundary represents.
Fu-An Chen has adopted a more subjectivist embodied deployment of the photograph, his mobile gaze operating as direct inscription of his mood and emotional relationship to the world. This is a strategy that is poles apart from that of Elin Karlsson, whose practice deploying archival works, performances, and straight photographs also opens up a complex emotional space of subjective experience. The power of the moving image as a tool for engaging with the fragile notion of political identity is central to the practices of both Joy Stacey and Glenn Miles, each of them playing with the complex relationship between our own gaze and that of the subject.
The natural world as an object of estranged knowledge appears in the work of Alastair Rodgers and Rich Cutler, who each, in different but equally melancholic ways, acknowledge the limitations of that engagement. Knowledge systems, powerful but terrifying, are also the focus of Lisa Barnard’s work on drone technology. Her work on the experience of drone operators makes us reflect upon our own seduction by the image and the terrifying world picture this seduction implies.
Charles Morgan Smith, in his series on the world picture represented by the planetarium, skirts the boundaries of that institution’s engagement with the technological sublime. On the borders of many of his pictures we see the dark shadow of the architecture itself, a penumbra suggesting the limitations of our knowledge. There is some relationship here to Tim Stephen’s enigmatic constructions in photographic paper, infinite loops of material inscriptions of light, that pose the final question about the kinds of space that photography can enfold, poised on the boundary between two dimensions and three, casting its own shadow out into the world.
Tellingly, Heidegger talks about this shadow at the end of his essay when he reflects upon the dark space into which our knowledge seeks to extend itself: ‘… This becoming incalculable remains the invisible shadow that is cast around all things everywhere when man has been transformed into subjectum and the world into picture’ .
Photography is part of the deep technology through which we picture the world: fragmentary, diverse, irruptive, and always cogniscent of those dark shadows beyond.
Joanna Lowry, 2013.