When thinking of a tangible photographic vessel, first and foremost the print comes to mind. On most occasions, a print is made up of paper, plus ink or chemicals, which divulge the tones of the image.
The photographic print exists in many forms. The print can be classified as a fine art object, read and commoditised along paintings, sculptures, and more, in an art gallery. The print is innately an historical and cultural artefact, preserving a moment in time on its surface, sometimes created by someone with forethought and sense of archival preservation. The print is taken as authority in the identification of someone on documents such as passports and drivers licences. The physical print is always a tactile, sensory object, it can be owned, given, bought or sold, it can be lost, damaged, or deteriorate over time, and it can also be wholly destroyed. The print is a photograph, a finished image, beyond a negative or digital file, affixed to a surface for future viewing, to reach this process it has often survived rounds of curation and elimination, before being deemed worthy of printing. Printed photographs have traditional...
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Some photographs are tangible – you can touch them, perhaps even hear or smell them, taste them if you really want to, visible with nothing more than a naked eye.
Others are intangible – you can't hold them, and they are only visible whilst being viewed on a screen, decoded by software, reliant on hardware, powered by electricity.
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While it may crude to divide the photograph in two, it is necessary to define the parameters of my research. I think most writing on photography (rightly) focuses on what I refer to as the image – I'm interested in studying the vessel.
After sketching this diagram I realised that it corresponds to Stephen Shore's concepts in The Nature of Photographs. He outlines three levels on which a photograph can be viewed: physical, depictive, and mental.
Although the physical aspects of viewing a photograph he describes can still apply to photographs viewed on screen, when the book was written in 2007 (the year I began my tertiary photographic studies) the focus was on printed photographs.
The term vessel was chosen to encompases all photographic containers, both hard (e.g. print) and soft copy (e.g. digital file).
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