THE DICTIONARY OF LIGHT & SHADE
Context: Most publications I've made have been bound by someone, or something, else. Sewn binding is something I would like to incorporate in future publications – fancier than staples, more natural than glue.
Aim: To test an unfamiliar, hand sewn bookbinding technique.
Method: Deciding to use a list of words I had already compiled, I consulted a 1978 edition of The Thames and Hudson Manual of Bookbinding, looking for a section sewn method — I settled on French sewing, also known as “sewing without tapes, the sections are linked together by passing thread under the loop of the preceding section.”
I used a bone folder to fold eight pieces of card in half, which would yield thirty-two pages to work with. The page count could easily be increased if each piece of card was substituted for four pieces of paper, or more than eight sections added.
After folding, I clamped the pages, folded edges together, and marked with a pencil (my current favourite tool) where the holes should be. While I could have used a four hole configuration (on such a small book), I thought six holes would be more aestheti...
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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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The distinction between analogue and digital photography has faded. While the processes remain distinctly different, we live in a hybrid world. Film is scanned and Instagrammed. Pixels are printed – I can even use my phone to expose instant (Polaroid) photographs.
As I look holistically at photographic practices, the words analogue and digital have become somewhat redundant distinctions. It doesn't matter how a photograph was made, just that it was made.
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I recently flew across the sea, with a suitcase full of books, to Photobook NZ, a festival that connects New Zealand's photobook community with the world. Held in Wellington at the Museum of New Zealand: Te Papa Tongarewa and the College of Creative Arts at Massey University, the second biennial festival welcomed high calibre international guests from around the world.
Throughout the lectures I was fortunate enough to attend, the act of returning again and again to a place, and the weaving of poetic words with photographs reverberated. I sadly missed Carolle Bénitah’s talk, who’s work literally strings together photographs, using “beads, coloured threads and scissors to alter her family photographs and albums to explore the memories of her childhood, and as a way to help her underst...
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Title: Library of Ashurbanipal
Year: 7th Century BC
Description: "Late Babylonian clay tablet: table of lunar longitudes. Contains a table for the daily change in the duration of the visibility of the moon on the thirty days of the month of the winter solstice according to the tradition of the city of Babylon." From a series of cuneiform clay tablets excavated in Kouyunjik, northern Iraq, believed to be the remains of King Ashurbanipal (668-c.630 BC) of Assyria's great library.
Significance: These clay tablets have weathered thousands of years, and still retain enough information for us to read. How long will our modern tablets last? I suspect that the iPad I am typing on will not be able to show you these words in a few decades, let alone hundreds of thousands of years...
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The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto exhibited Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross, buried in 1944, dug up in 1945.
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365 WAYS TO DESTROY A PHOTOGRAPH
Artist: Anonymous
Year: 2014
Description: "Beginning on July 25th, 2014, one photograph will be destroyed each day for a period of one year. The remnants of every photograph will be collected, documented, saved, and exhibited at the conclusion of the year." Although the project appears to have been abandoned on day 72.
Relevance: This systematic destruction of physical photographs reveals what remains after deliberate destruction. To me, destroying digital photographic data seems like it would more finite – data you've handed over to someone or something else is a different story.
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Artist: Stephen Gill
Year: 2006
Description: Stephen Gill created a photobook of pictures buried where they were taken."The amount of time the images were left underground varied depending on the amount of rainfall. The depths that the pictures were buried at also varied, as did their positioning. Sometimes they were facing each other, sometimes back to back or sometimes buried singly... Not knowing what an image would look like once it was dug up introduced an element of chance and surprise which I found appealing. This feeling of letting go and in a way collaborating with place — allowing it also to work on putting the finishing touches to a picture — felt fair. Maybe the spirit of the place can also make its mark."
Significance: The artist has introduced an element of chance, of manufactured wabi-sabi to his work. It is not the first time photographs have been buried...
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Artist: Sarah Abad
Year: 2015
Description: "Whether a hand written note, a number representing the batch or the negative, the brand of the paper or the name of a photographic studio, each of these markings presents a story and are beautiful and fascinating in their own right."
Significance: Inspired by the discovery of a tin of old photographs in a garage, this book highlights the materiality of photographic prints, celebrating the often overlooked photographic vessel.
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Context: The alternative to preserving photographs, is to lose them. What does a book of lost photographs look like?
Aim: To visually represent the absence of lost photographs.
Precedent: Will Steacy's Photographs Not Taken (book cover pictured above), perhaps the only photography book I’ve bought that is entirely devoid of photographs, is "a collection of photographers' essays about failed attempts to make a picture…These mental negatives depict the unedited world and the moments of life that do not exist in a single frame." In a different vein, I have also previously created a photobook devoid of photographs, 2nd’s, after I discovering a dusty box of slides marked 2nd’s. Inside this box I found empty slide mounts along with what appeared to be accidentally mounted frames from the end of rolls of film, partially exposed, partly blank, yet curiously interesting.
Method: I began by thinking about my own experiences with lost photographs, in particul...
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WHAT DOES A DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPH LOOK LIKE WHEN NO ONE IS LOOKING AT IT?
Like a million pieces of chocolate sent via Wonka Vision, waiting to be recalled, reunited, and consumed – thanks to the imagination of Roald Dahl!
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"That is the most important book you will ever make." Dan Milnor recalls telling a Blurb customer in response to the realisation that books could be a vessel for family photos, not just a commercial enterprise. “I can make a book for my family. I can use the photos we’ve had our entire lives.”
It begs the question, what makes a family photobook gift worthy, while a family photo Dropbox account isn’t a present worth sharing?
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William Morris is reported to have taught, "have nothing in your houses, that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful." In considering my own home, his words have resonated with me, even more than Marie Kondo's best selling philosophy of living with only what "sparks joy." However, when we come to consider the photo objects we keep, I believe both mantras inadequate.
In Evocative Objects: Things We Think With Sherry Turkle notes, "we find it familiar to consider objects as useful or aesthetic...we are on less familiar ground when we consider objects a companions to our emotional lives or provocations to thought."
Photographs can be aesthetically pleasing, functional, as well as evocative (and more) – none of these are mutually exclusive or set in stone, and will always be subjective. But perhaps, thinking about these categories could help decide if a particul...
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At some point, before we can see a photograph, the light we've captured lies dormant in darkness. We require chemistry or electronic technology to make photographs visible.
Once a photograph is made physically visible, as a negative or print, it requires nothing more than light for us to see it. Digital photographic files rely on ongoing intervention in order to be visible — is a digital photograph still a photograph when it’s not being viewed on screen?
When digital cameras were developed, many that argued that digital photography was not true photography. That's changed, so have our dictionaries to reflect evolving language — you'd have a hard time finding someone today that denies a digital photograph its name. While the file may be different from the photograph, they remain inseparable, just as printed photograph is bound to the paper it is printed on.
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TAKE A WALK THROUGH YOUR HOME, WITHOUT MOVING ANYTHING, WHAT PHOTOGRAPHS CAN YOU SEE?
I arrive home, ignoring the junk mail in my hand, I see three bookshelves, laden with words as well as photographs. I put my bag down, grab a glass of water from the kitchen, where any unsightly packaging, including anything with photos, is hidden behind doors. Then I sit down to take my shoes off, to my left is a black and white salon-inspired gallery wall, there's an array of framed prints and, of course, photographs:
- A postcard featuring a photograph of Ansel Adams standing on the roof of a car using a large format camera in Yosemite National Park bought while visiting the park in 2015.
- A promotional postcard from a Trent Parke exhibition at Stills Gallery — a satisfactory substitute for the limited edition print I coveted.
- A candid photo of my now husband and I taken about a year after we'd met.
- A souvenir print of a low plane over Hong Kong, taken when the airport was close to the city centre, I have no memory of this spectacle, yet I did land in that airport as a baby.
- An A4 inkjet print scanned from a 35mm negative of my favourite local architecture — the Sydney Opera House — taken as a high school student in 2006, reminding me that while a photographer’s eye can be developed, an ‘eye' is as innate as it i...
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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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