FABRIC OF PHOTOGRAPHY:MATERIAL MATTERS

Photography leans toward the literal…

Written by Claire Raymond

Visiting Research Collaborator, Princeton University

Photography leans toward the literal, its capacity for dead-eye mimicry tending to yoke it to the figure. But the medium’s materiality, as Megan Ringrose’s fresh and welcome exhibit – Fabric of Photography: Material Matters – illuminates, also shapes photography’s mnemonic and affective force. Photography is not simply the reflector in images of the material world, it is also of the material world, material in itself, light’s trace or stain on substrate. Photography's origins emerge dually and in tandem from the urge to create the figure, through the writing of light, and the experimental fascination with the materiality of making light's mark stay.  This second strand in the weft of photography, the material, tactile, haptic, mark of light as imprint on substrate, is the colloquy of Fabric of Photography. Here, the hand's touch and the figure's absence bring the photographic image closer, into the visual field, shedding the discourse of imagined scenes that figural photography conjures, and also removes the viewer from the trompe l’oeil of representation, carrying us through to the directness of presentation. Well-chosen works by Neil Ayling, John A Blythe, Sylvie Bonnot, Ellen Carey, Alice Cazenave, Karel Doing, Nettie Edwards, Hannah Fletcher, Anna Luk, Rita Rodner, Megan Ringrose, and Kateryna Snizhko, carry this theme of the material object that is the photograph. Ringrose’s choreography of the whole is admirable.

Ayling’s work brings the viewer into immediate embodied interaction with the work, challenging the museum typology of the photographic image as that from which one stands back, to see as image. Instead, Ayling’s sculptural work of fused materiality galvanizes the photographic image’s presence in embodied space. Shifting from the frame of materiality to emphasize its evanescent fragility, Alice Cazenave’s delicate and luminous portrait, Breathe, casts a woman’s face imprinted on a geranium leaf, like the shadow of time as the portrait emerges from the leaf, the features mapping a fixing of light’s trace. This haunting sense of trace carries into Karel Doings extraordinary remaking of Calotypes (a process originated by William Henry Fox Talbot) as Phytography, a process Doing invented in 2016. His phytographs, developed on oak leaves, draw the gallic acid that Talbot used in his process from the leaves themselves. The effect is of eerie beauty as the leaves are illuminated through their own chemistry, redefining Talbot’s claim that photography can enable nature to write “herself.” Nettie Edwards’ Grave Goods and The Tears of Things continue this forceful intersection of materiality, photography, and mnemonic work of the object-image.  These mourning pieces draw on Victorian practices of embodied mourning, saving for example the hair of the dead in context of photographic collages, but Edwards’ work contemporizes this gesture by making the photograph itself bear the materiality of the work of mourning, evocatively merging the image of loss with its tactility. Anna Luk’s camera-less  images harken back to Anna Atkins’ botanical photograms, infusing this camera-less tradition of the photograph as light’s direct imprint (rather than the trace of light’s reflection off other material forms) with vibrant contemporary colour. Also keying off Atkins, albeit in a new vein, Rodner’s Binary Garden emphasizes the mergence of digital and analog, exposing the fractal-like quality of inorganic, and micro-organic, formal shapes that appear to be plantlike, botanical.

Kateryna Snizhko and Megan Ringrose pull the force of colour into works that protest what Foucault defines as the camera’s clinical controlling gaze. Ringrose’ gorgeous colour splash specifically emerges from the artist’s rejection of the camera as essential tool of the photograph, while Snizhko gathers the detritus of industrial photographic products to forge an uncanny photographic work of colour of blur. Blythe and Carey offer works that shine with fierce colour, allowing the image to emerge from the process rather than asking the process to serve the figural. Blythe’s use of defunct papers, Kodak, Fujifilm, and papers from Soviet era eastern bloc countries, manifest as “little deaths” as each image represents a paper reaching closer to the end of its availability, resisting thus a key trope of photography as the realm endless repeatability. Carey’s sublime Super Long Pull (from her brilliant series Crush & Pull, which my own essay accompanies) transforms Polaroid’s earlier role as the iconic image-maker of the vernacular and mundane into a spectacular abstract work. A second Carey Crush & Pull  carries this large-scale size, a spectacular oceanic work in the uncanny shape of a shield, crinkles and flaws jagging deep azure and sepia, an effect of veining. With these gorgeous material flaws of Polaroid print technology, haunted sense of the vulnerability of all materiality is conveyed. Carey’s work manifests as elegiac surface.

Along this theme of shedding, Bonnot creates “molting” photographs, experimental processes wherein the fiber support (she takes the gelatin containing the emulsion off to drape ) for prints is removed. Her images cast onto wood masterfully conjure disappearing spaces in Siberia, a potent doubling of medium and message. Fletcher similarly, albeit with very different results, experiments with the chemistry of the print, arbitrarily altering the time line of the fixer, that is, the chemical that stops and hold the marking of light (otherwise every photograph would become nothing but darkness, marking light’s continual passage, or blank substrate absence, with the image vanishing under light’s continued press), The Fixation grid manifests a kind of new organic form of light, one intently attuned to time’s passage.

A new organic form of light, indeed, could gloss every work in Ringrose’s exhibit. The return to the origins of photography, as materiality, reminds us that social media and online images are neither the genesis nor the entirety of photography’s destiny. And yet, as much as the exhibit celebrates reconnecting with photography’s experimental origins, Fabric of Photography also allows us to think anew what photography is.

Fabric, haptic, tactile, is loaded with the heft and force of touch. Fabric forms the clothes we wear, the curtains we might hang in windows, the sheets on the bed. In other words, fabric envelops us, shields us, protects us, while affording a permeable membrane to the world. The vulnerability of fabric echoes and encloses the vulnerability of our lives as material, embodied, beings, and photography shares in this echoing. The image’s origin as material trace, touch, indicates its presence among those things in the world which can be erased, that is, the forms of matter. The fabric of photography re-envisions photography not as static formal emblem that stands apart from but rather as carrier of material weight and difference. Ringrose’s exhibit, in bringing together nuanced and balanced iterations of experimental photographies unified by a mutual vigilance to the material, reminds us of the medium’s origins so as to extend its future possibilities.

 Claire Raymond, Visiting Research Collaborator, Princeton University

 Fabric of Photography website