This is Not a Room

Transformations may occur in photography, ‘representation and real things can be made to seem equivalent’. It is photography’s ability to distort reality as well as confirm it that inspired me to make this photograph.
At first glance this looks to be a photograph of me taken inside a domestic space. In fact this photograph is constructed using a collection of photographic cardboard cut-outs, so technically it is a photograph of a photograph. In reality they are flat, small and lifeless pieces of paper, but in a photograph the space these objects inhabit is changed, these two dimensional objects are restored to the status of three dimensional, there is an appearance of depth, the scale is distorted, the objects and the scene now appear alive and real.
 With this photograph I’m relying on our initial reaction that we tend to see photographs as objective records of the world; we rely on their ‘trivial realism’. It is not until closer inspection or acquisition of more knowledge about the image that it becomes clear that it is not a true representation of reality but a build up of individual parts to construct a reality.


Liquid Intelligence

Alex Gregory’s cartoon shows not only our susceptibility to mistake representations for reality but our confusion between new technologies and other more archaic forms such as the concept of the window. ‘New’ technology often simulates older media. We often consider the photograph as a window, as a transparent view on and out to the real.

In Jeff Wall’s short essay, ‘Photography and Liquid Intelligence’ Andrei Tarkovsky’s film ‘Solaris, is used as an example to inform us of a connection between photography and water. In the film, scientists are studying an oceanic planet while simultaneously, through the form of memories turned hallucinations, they find themselves in turn investigated by the water planet.

Within this series of photographs, water is used as a medium to investigate the process of representation. Slowing down the objects as they are dropped into the depths of the water gives us time to reflect upon the ideas presented by the represented objects.  Photography is the perfect medium to capture ‘complicated natural forms’ created by the impact of the object with the water; this also confirms that we are looking at a photograph. Taken and printed using traditional methods and equipment, these photographs foreground an example of photographic representation and the processes that happen within photograph, its scientific basis and the creative construction of the image as a window onto itself. Like the scientists from Solaris, we, through the use of water and mirrors are given a chance to study photographic representation, as a transformation and staging of the reality that it is meant to represent.