Since its earliest days, photography has been variously side-tracked along
diversionary routes, giving us such exotic deviations as the solarised
image, Man Ray’s ‘Rayographs’, Alvin Langdon Coburn’s ‘Vortographs’ and the
superimposition of Duane Michals’ pseudo-narrative sequences, to name but a
few. Today, some of the most interesting developments are found in ‘process
photography’, a mode of photographic art where the nature of the eventual
image is manipulated and shaped by processes beyond the chemical and the
digital. Little common ground links artists working in this area, save
perhaps a sense of abstraction achieved at the cost of a near erosion of
photography’s indexical origins. These origins have been progressively
replaced by a palimpsest of the tracks and traces that modified and overran
them. The bottom line here is that process photography is a mode of
photography whose chief referent is itself.
Process painting, brought up to date by such contemporary artists as Alexis
Harding, Callum Innes and Jason Martin, shares certain features with process
photography. Paint is used not merely as a facilitating medium, but one
whose very nature acts as the catalyst that determines the outcome of the
painting itself. In a similar way, a process photographer such as Neil
Reddy, working with light instead of paint and a camera lens instead of a
brush, manipulates the way in which a lens interacts with manipulated light
to create photographic images with a life – an ontology – all of their own.
Although process painters often fly by the seats of their pants, they are
able to see the results of their actions immediately. The process
photographer has far less direct hands-on control, with a longer period
between the creative act and the finished product. The interface between
artist and artwork is not down to hand/eye co-ordination, but to a more
intuitive feeling for the effects of minute adjustments which, because
invisible while being implemented, demand a special kind of faith and
boldness.
Most process photography does not – to quote a photographic cliché –
‘capture a moment’, but rather condenses a sequence of moments into a frozen
image, its temporal ‘envelope’ distorted, its identity disguised. These
images are essentially investigative: dissecting layers of indexical
familiarity, giving reality a makeover, shifting perceptual paradigms,
questioning mechanisms of observation. How much of our everyday environments
do we consciously perceive? Do we really perceive them at all, or simply
glide by on cruise-control, perception in neutral?
Amongst the artists considered here, only Florencia Durante and Neil Reddy
employ camera lenses in their work, and of these two it is only Durante who
uses her lens in anything like the traditional sense. Durante’s photographs
have a mien that falls somewhere between the Constructivist paintings of
Malevich or El Lissitzky and the deconstructive paper architecture of Zaha
Hadid – with perhaps just a nod in the direction of Franz Kline’s busy
Abstract Expressionism. As preparation for her recent series titled Studio
Compositions, Durante constructed a loosely assembled diorama comprising
everyday objects in her studio. Integrating mirrors and other reflective
surfaces to diffuse the projected light, the forms in this diorama become
increasingly complex and confused until a semi-abstract confluence of lines
and shapes is established. With the exception of a small visual G-spot of
bright red that refracts minimally across the scene, the overall demeanour
is monochromatic.
The lens work of Neil Reddy can only be described as eccentric, with results
that are other-worldly and bizarre. He works with the standard components of
camera, lens, film and light, but there the normality ends. Using a
specially constructed box – essentially a sophisticated pinhole camera with
a front wall made of metal foil and pierced with a multitude of holes – he
creates a light show in miniature, which only the film witnesses and
records. During a long-exposure he sequentially adjusts the focus of the
lens and, using a special cradle, shifts the attitude of the camera; in so
doing, he effectively superimposes the traces of light, giving the resulting
image an illusory three-dimensional texture. Unwary viewers might assume
they are witnessing representations of real – albeit somewhat exotic –
objects, or else that the illusion is created by digital technology. Unlike
Durante’s photographs, here we are looking at surfaces that are constructed
from light rather than reflecting it.
The contemporary crossover between painting and photography is a frequently
addressed theme, and undoubtedly David Hiscock’s spectacular images are very
painterly. A few years ago he moved from painting to photography and is now
moving photography into the realm of painting. In Hiscock’s work we are
faced with distorted traces of reality which have been visually encrypted.
Streaming colours and rippling forms convey the impression that something
weirdly ecstatic has taken place. But any parameters by which we might
attempt to decipher such scenes are destined to failure; these are no
orthodox camera shots, taken by no orthodox camera. Hiscock’s photo-finish
camera replaces the conventional lens with a vertical slit, no wider than a
human hair. This aperture is designed to freeze the events across a single
line of vision, in order to establish the finishing order at the end of a
race. Hiscock has adapted this specialist camera to stretch the visual
moment, presenting us with extended, meandering elevations whose alternative
realities beguile the eye. The streaks, slicks and swirls of colour that
eddy across these images confound our attempts to establish their basis in
reality.
The work of Robert Davies also strongly references painting but, of all
these artists’ work, his is perhaps the most surprising. The objects he
creates are the least like photographs: maybe hard-edged abstractions,
perhaps paint samples, or even replicas of obscure national flags, but
photographs? Most of these diminutive works are tricolours, but not ones
that deploy the colours of any national flag with which we are familiar. In
fact Davies is engaged in a long-running, systematic and exhaustive
examination of colour synthesis and its complex spectral and
psycho-perceptual relationships. He uses a custom-built light-box, in
conjunction with his enlarger’s adjustable colour-filter and cibachrome
photographic paper, to create a range of unorthodox and optically
challenging colour combinations. The way we perceive these bands of uniquely
synthesised colour (no negatives are involved) is radically altered by their
varied chromatic juxtapositions. Framing these works behind a shield of 25mm
acrylic has the effect not only of enhancing the dynamic of the colours, but
also of transforming these images into pristine photographic objects. Unlike
the hard-edged abstraction of Albers, Stella or Noland, with whose aesthetic
they might be compared, these are not heavyweight, spectacular works, but
highly considered, intense and hard-won meditations on colour which carry a
conviction by the very fact that they are photographs rather than paintings.
As an interface with the natural world, Susan Derges’s photographs from her
River Taw series are second to none. It seems apt that the physical and
direct form of process photography employed by Derges should be used to
record the natural fluvial processes of the river. By immersing photographic
paper, held in an aluminium slide, just beneath the surface of the water,
then exposing it to a fleeting, diffuse flash, she creates photograms which
document the interaction between water and light. The ripples on the surface
of a river are a physical revelation of the influences of gravity and
friction, a map of underwater objects and obstructions expressed in the
contours of the river’s surface. Heraclitus’s famous statement ‘you cannot
step in the same river twice’ is neatly corroborated by the complex
permutations visited by the river upon Derges’s images. The configuration of
these standing waves is, of course, compounded by the turbulent flow that
expresses the dynamic of the whole body of moving water. Derges’s
photographic intervention in the flow of the river means that the subsequent
image is also – true to the nature of process photography – partly an image
of itself, of its presence reflected in the movements of the river’s
surface.
Direct, physical interface with the environment is also part of Daro
Montag’s modus operandi. He creates his images, or ‘bioglyphs’ as he likes
to call them, by letting things work directly on the film itself. In an
early project he buried film in soil to let micro-organisms work upon it. In
two more recent images, Yew and K2, the film records the decay of yew
berries and kiwi fruit. As the fruit slumps into decay with the film beneath
it, it reacts chemically to create the radiating lines and traceries, the
mazes and haloes that signify the sites of bacterial and fungal feeding
frenzies. The process here is not just photographic, but also one of
physical degeneration, an entropy which has been serially arrested: perhaps
encapsulating Roland Barthes’ indications that the photograph is primarily a
signifier of the process of entropy.
Robert Davies’ Material Light is at Rhodes + Mann, London, until 14 April
2002, and tours to Mannheim in April/May 2002, Waldkraiburg in June/July
2002, and Berlin in October 2003. A catalogue, with an essay by Mark
Gisbourne, accompanies the show.
www.rhodesmann.com
Neil Reddy’s work can be seen in Seeing Things: Photographing Objects, 1850
– 2001 at the V&A’s Canon Photography Gallery, London, until 18 August 2002.
www.vam.ac.uk
Roy Exley is a freelance writer and curator