The works resulting from these production processes not only question the conditions of a photograph's creation but also explore photographs as material things that exhibit traces of their making and handling through processes of trial and error. In undertaking this processbased work, these artists acknowledge the importance of chance, which intervenes between the intention for the work and the final outcome.
This assessment task requires you to explore the aesthetics of analogue production and the agency of chance by drawing on concepts relating to optics and the observation of light to create a body of related works.
‘A long journey to the image’ is a series of thirteen documentary photographs. I use a camera obscura; I specifically created this camera to capture images from beneath the surface of the churning sea. The suspended reflected light images were recorded from above the water, from the curved and polished surfaces of old silver spoons. Both sets of images were documented by iPhone.
“We tune chance to our creative end. “ David Haines
This work included extensive experimentation. With a focus on how the projection extends and uniquely frames the obscura images with shadow, colour, light and line. How the reflected images include distorted echos of the past in their worn and pitted metal surfaces.
The overall narrative of this work is a long and exploratory journey to an instillation not reduced to images but expanded to an experience of relationships between image, object, space and self by its contextual, tactile journey.
Although the final documentation of photography and reproduction enable the virtual instillation to be experienced and fixed however abstractly, in time. The process of gaining these images through camerless technique pushes me forward, expanding possibility and creating variant paths through unconsidered outcomes. I have an interest in following the line off the page to see what it becomes.