Interfering with Thereness

This work was created for the group show ‘Take Me There’ MOPLA 2012, the title and theme for the exhibition started a thought process about where I would like technology  to take me in the future. I kept coming back to a sense of wanting to go home; a return to something we have lost, a place of simplicity. In itself, photography can be likened to a portal to this other place, be it a vicarious journey or our own. The creation of a  photographic image facilitates and allows this journey.

‘Interfering with Thereness’ is a work that explores a breakdown in the basic technical elements in analogue photography which in turn challenges our usual journey into a photograph . Photographic film requires controlled amounts of light to create the perfect negative but the lo fi camera leaks light impeding this process and it becomes a visible interference with the image.  Scratches in the emulsion from cheap processing labs give a visibility to the negative as an imperfect object.  The imperfect negative creates the unfamiliar denying us the return to a known place and instead takes us somewhere that exists purely within the image itself.