The Unknown Image: Post-Photography Strategies

02/08/2019 Post-Photography: The Unknown Image - ELEPHANT
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10 Mar 2017
OPINION
Post-Photography: The Unknown Image

The photographic medium has been changing at an
unprecedented pace in the last two decades. We now all have
a camera in our pockets (or bags, or on our desks) or there’s
one hovering over our heads ready to snap our image.
So taking a picture, being at the right place at the right time
(in the tradition of Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment) is no
longer the challenge. In our image-saturated world, the
challenge is what to do with all these images, and
photographers are finding innovative strategies for dealing
with photographic material. For the artist-photographers in
this piece, a picture is just a platform, the starting point (or
end point) of a lengthy process, taking photography to places
it has never been before.
Words by Robert Shore
Aliki Braine, The Hunt 3 (Panorama), 2009, black and white photograph (hole-punched negative), 100 x 240
cm, courtesy of Aliki Braine/Troika Editions
https://elephant.art/post-photography-unknown-image/ 1/30
This feature originally appeared in Issue 13.

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‘Whatever it grants to vision and

whatever its manner, a photograph is
always invisible: it is not it that we
see’
If you’ re a photographer, there’ s no escaping the influence of Roland Barthes, or the

implications of the words quoted above. Of course, when I say ‘ photographer’ I
mean ‘ artist working with photography’. The anecdotal evidence suggests that
that’s a distinction that photographically inclined artists continue to have to make. If
you tell someone at a party that you’ re painting, they rarely assume you mean the
house-decorating kind of painting–or, at least, context will allow them to determine
how likely that is. But if you tell the same audience that you’re taking photographs,
they’re certain to think of almost every other activity, except art.
This response is in part conditioned by a perceived hierarchy within the art world,
where painting is deemed hard and serious and deeply expressive of the
artist’s ‘vision’, while photography is… well, anyone can take a photograph, can’t
they? ‘Seduced by Art’, which opened in October 2012 at the National Gallery in
London and put classic and contemporary photographs alongside Old Masters,
shows the grander institutions gradually embracing the arriviste medium as it
approaches its 200th birthday. But if art photography is receiving increased
recognition from the establishment, it is coming under ever–greater pressure from
the wider culture. After all, not only can everyone take photos; more or less
everyone does in the digital era. The real world is full of cameras; the virtual world is
full of photographic images. Citizen-photographers click away constantly with their
smartphones, immediately uploading the resulting images to Flickr and other sharing
sites. Go to Google Images and type in ‘sunsets’ and you’ll get 33,800,000 matches
in just 0.19 seconds. CCTV surveillance cameras blindly add to this profusion,
capturing the image of the average city-dweller up to 300 times a day. Amidst such
abundance, uniqueness of vision is hard to come by.
But back to Barthes and the idea that photography is above all else a medium of
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witness, a self-effacing window onto the world. Of course, it’ s never been quite true
anyway but, perhaps as a result of the medium’s reputation for the value-neutral
recording of reality, the notion of objective photographic truth is being increasingly
tested in the revolutionized intellectual and technological environment of the new
millennium; the fact/fiction dividing line is being continually transgressed in
photographic work. In a sense, the last thing you should expect from photography
these days is objective truth.
Given the superabundance of images in the contemporary world, is there any point
in artists taking their own photographs anymore? Found imagery has
become increasingly important in what might be called post-photographic practice,
with the internet serving as a laboratory for a major kind of image-making
experimentation. Sharing is a keyword of the digital age, and appropriation–or
perhaps ‘stealing’–is a major post-photographic strategy. The online environment is a
key hunting ground for such acts of creative, transformative borrowing. Where
artists do still wield cameras, there’ s certainly a sense that merely taking
photographs is no longer enough, with the artist’s hand continually intervening to go
beyond the traditional image and photography taking a ‘materialist turn’–paying
increased attention to the support or frame or underlining the sculptural physicality
of the work–to create a fresh tension between image and object.
Art photography is not dead, but it is being hybridized.
‘You get to know an image really well

by destroying it’
Back in 2006, when French artist Aliki Braine was given a residency at the
Edward James Foundation in the idyllic English countryside, she set off with the
intention of making drawings ‘as an eighteenth-century amateur draughtsman would
have done. But I didn’t like the drawings I was doing, so I started to think about
making drawings on photographs, using the photograph as a prop.’ Frustrated, she
turned to Alexander Cozens’s A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing
Original Compositions of Landscape (1785). ‘One of Cozens’s techniques is to make

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random blotches of black ink to help stimulate images of landscape,’ she
explains. ‘So I began doing that with a hole punch on negatives.’
In truth, that wasn’t the start of Braine’s love affair with photography–or with hole
punches, for that matter. ‘The premise of my work has always been to rework the
negative in some form or other,’ she explains. But the West Dean residency marked
a new stage in her exploration of historical techniques associated with other media
and their possible application to photography. For instance, at this time she also
produced a series of ‘Pricked Photographs’, drawing on the method for transferring
cartoon designs in the making of frescos. And then there’s her love of Old Master
paintings–which comes as little surprise when you discover that she works at the
National Gallery in London. Scenes by the likes of Carracci, Gentileschi and Uccello
lie explicitly behind the seemingly abstract arrangement of sinister dots and holes in
her Hunt and Ugly Spots series.
The materials and techniques that Braine employs are, by her own admission, very
simple: a generous application of black ink to the negative blocks the light in the
enlarger and produces the distinctively uncanny white forms of her White
Out series; elsewhere circular stickers and hole punches serve. ‘The crunch of the
hole punch on the neg is unbelievably pleasurable,’ she notes.
‘The premise of my work has always been to show the photograph as an object, to
make its materiality felt and understood,’ she says. ‘The work for me really does
need to be a physical object. They’re not that nice as screensavers. People often
want to put their fingers on the prints. They are really crunchy and tactile, and you
can see all the defects of the intervention.’
She considers herself a poor darkroom technician, however. ‘Other people make my
prints. Although they’re really physical, I hand over the printing work to other people,
who are really kind. I sometimes literally bring them dregs. I’ve sometimes worked
on the negative so much that there’ s almost nothing left. But they’re still happy to
put it in their machines.’
‘There has always been a tension

between the manual and mechanical
aspects of photography’ MENU
‘The genre of landscape is so loaded. There’ s so much to contend with in terms of

the history of painting, but place is so loaded politically too.’ So says London-based
artist Dafna Talmor, whose Constructed Landscapes merge views of different
locations–Venezuela, Israel, England, the USA–to ‘create a space that doesn’t exist in
the world but that is rooted in reality’.
‘I didn’t used to feel I knew how to go about addressing those areas [of politics and
art history],’ she explains. ‘I took photographs of landscapes for a few years,
aimlessly, as I was making another series of works, my Obstructed Views.’ The latter
are interior shots featuring a human subject (the artist herself), sitting in an
anonymous interior space in front of a window. Light floods in but through the
window, illuminating the room but preventing any clear vision of the world outside. ‘I
like the element of limitation that interior spaces provide,’ she says. ‘I was always
interested in the suggestion of what was outside, not in the specifics. It was more a
metaphor, a space for the viewer to project themselves into. It was about not tying
the image to a specific location.’
But Talmor found herself returning to the boxes of analogue landscapes that she’d
taken ‘aimlessly’ and experimenting with merging the negatives of different
locations–bringing, say, the Israeli desert and the Yorkshire Dales into collision–to
produce a series of ‘Constructed Landscapes’. In doing so, she would take a scalpel
to one layer of negative to remove any manmade elements: cars, roads, paths. ‘It
was an attempt to reclaim the purity of nature, but it was also an attempt to remove
the clues to specificity I was so against in the first place.’
‘It’s quite violent,’ she says of her scalpel use. ‘I make them in a really crude way
with Sellotape. The object itself is quite fragile.’ The cutaway part of the
merged negatives is then overexposed in the enlarger to create a black void. ‘It
becomes another element of landscape,’ says Talmor of these repeated
dark ‘interruptions’ in the series. ‘It can look like a river or body of water, but it also
plays with the sense of perspective to suggest a geological cut, as if you were
looking under the ground.’
Talmor has a long-standing interest in Pictorialism and the various

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experimental techniques and processes associated with Modernism: combination
printing and scratching, defacing and other physical interventions with the
materiality of the film. ‘The materiality of the negative is a core element of my work,’
she says. Risk is one of the pleasures of the merging process. ‘What was really
important to me about the process and the fact it was analogue was its
irreversibility,’ she says. ‘When it’s digital you can always undo what you’ve done
and maintain a master file, whereas here once I’ve cut into the negative there’s no
turning back. There’s that element of risk and chance and of doing it blindly: until I
print it, I don’t know what it’s going to look like.’
‘Perhaps the only reality to which

photography has access is light’
Landscape has long been a key element in the work of Jorma Puranen–though
the viewer is rarely if ever offered an uninterrupted view of the Arctic expanses
where the acclaimed Finnish artist takes many of his photographs. As Puranen has
explained: ‘For 15 years I have been engaged in landscape projects in which… I have
prevented direct admiration of the landscape by putting something in between the
viewer and the subject: transparent portraits, phrases in Latin, flags. They have
served as obstacles of a kind, denying any admiration of the landscape as such.’ With
this recent Icy Prospects series of ‘photograph paintings’, Puranen went a stage
further, painting a piece of wooden board, carrying it out into nature and
photographing the reflection of the surrounding landscape on the painted board. The
sublimity of nature is thus only present as a spectral distorting blur on the surface of
the image: ‘the possibility of direct viewing is completely denied. What we see now
is a mere reflection of the landscape.’
For an earlier series of works, Shadows, Reflections and All That Sort of Thing,
Puranen photographed reflections on the surfaces of historical portraits to bring
about ‘rehabilitations’ of the subjects. ‘The dialogue between past and present lies at
the very heart of my work,’ the artist explains.
‘In many ways a photograph denies history. It is a fragment of time and space, being
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dislocated from the flow of time from which it was extracted. While it is of the past,
it is also of the present in that the past is transported to the present. In Barthes’s
famous phrase–the “there-then” becomes the “here-now”.
‘In Shadows, Reflections and All That Sort of Thing I tried to create a living frame of
reference in which the people depicted, and their fates, could be reconsidered. I was
exploring how reflected light acts as a mediator of images, masking or obscuring our
access to them, adding layers of uncertainty to specific historical realities. Some
might say that reflection–or reflected light–is the very subject matter of this work.
‘While photographing these painted portraits, I felt as though I was knocking on the
frame of a painting and asking “Is anyone there?” or saying “Wake up, I know you are
there!” In the withered flesh of each work I wanted to show a person.
‘As zooming into the past is not yet possible, we try to find other ways to deal with
experiences of it. In my case, by dislocating archival and museum
materials, fragments of the past, from their original purposes and intentions, I
suggest a fictive historical world. I wish to generate narrative possibilities, to point to
the twilight zone of what might have happened. In general by using a plethora of
visual historical pickings, I seek to create a fabric of encounters and connections, a
matrix that I translate into images and narratives, a field of fantasy and imaginings.
‘In Shadows, Reflections I was particularly interested in the resources

of photography to speak of the levels of history and memory. I was interested in the
tensions between the moment and permanence, between a flash of light and the
patina which is centuries old. Thus I hope the photographs become sites of a fluid
renegotiation of the past. They are not merely evidence in terms of pure document–
they are of the past and of the present as they move through different spaces.’
‘I like to call it having a conversation

with the images, making a
spontaneous response to them’

Dafna Talmor is happy to discuss her practice of blending negatives in terms

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of photomontage and collage. Perhaps it’s the influence of John Stezaker–for a long
time a senior tutor at the RCA and the recipient of the prestigious Deutsche Borse
Börse Photography Prize in 2012–that partly explains the abundance of photographic
collage work on display at the Frieze Art Fair in London this autumn. Stezaker, of
course, is one of those ‘artists working with photography’ who aren’t actually known
for their use of a camera or for taking their own photographs, found imagery instead
serving as the basis of Stezaker’s work.
London-based artist Julie Cockburn likewise works with found materials. She trained
as a sculptor, although–in a sign of the way her work was already developing–her
degree show was entirely wall hung, consisting of reliefs using cut photographs,
postcards and catalogue images. ‘I learned at college to recognize the integrity of
the materials I use,’ she says. ‘Now I look for an authenticity in my raw materials–
almost iconic (for example, plasticine, embroidery silks, marbles), always utterly
undiluted, familiar materials.’
In her (mostly internet-sourced) imagery, on the other hand, she looks for ‘an
authentic, almost archetypal ordinariness, which invites connection/identification
with the everyman/woman... I am drawn to very static images. Studio portraits,
studies, rather than story-telling images. These lend themselves to the layering of a
narrative through manipulation, materials added, and titles.’
This narrative doesn’t always suggest itself to her immediately. ‘Sometimes I know
exactly what I want to do, other times I will sit with an image for a while, pinning
clusters of them on my studio walls, and just wait. I have chosen the initial objects
for a reason, though it’s not always clear what that is. It’s usually just a matter of
time…
‘The first thing I do is scan or photograph the image so that I have a facsimile that I
can work on. They are precious, these found images, and so I don’t initially work
directly onto them when I’ m planning a piece. I do a lot of preparation work on the
computer, especially with the embroidery and collaged works. They need to be
pricked and cut very accurately, so I make templates and acetates to aid me.
‘I get a rush of adrenalin when I start a piece–it’s an exciting moment when the
intervention starts and I commit to the defacement. And then there is often a long,
obsessive, repetitive and laborious process that can be incredibly tedious. As a work
progresses, it may change from the original design–bits are added, colours changed,
but unlike painting, there is no going backwards–you can’t scrape off an embroidery

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or undo a cut. I find it quite stressful too, because I have such a clear image of what I
am trying to make and the process sometimes gets in the way.
‘People often say my work is aggressive, but I think it is the opposite. I think it is a
loving practice. I am a perfectionist.’
‘After a while the concern for just the

surface of things started to unsettle
me’
Fracturing and suturing are at the heart of Charles Grogg’s Reconstructions, a series
of extremely tactile image fragments printed on Japanese gampi paper and stitched
together with thread. ‘There is no such thing as the experience of a continuous
landscape,’ explains the Southern California-based artist. ‘Get in the middle of it, and
there’s too much to keep track of. Pull away, and the details begin to
disappear… This is true with photographs, too, of course, because they at once
make a site of consciousness and block out the periphery. When we look at a
photograph, we come up with stories, some of which may be true, many of which
involve some degree of fictive projection. But we never get “the whole
picture” because the frame cannot include everything. My aim was to expose each
piece of the reconstructions one at a time when I printed them so that the image
would no longer seem quite as continuous. The lack of wholeness is unsettling on
some level and satisfying because it comes off as real. Yet being that my attitude was
not to destroy anything, I tried out ways to put the picture, the landscape, the world
back together using push-pins, darts, tape, staples, glue and also thread. I liked the
feel and the motion of the needle piercing the image surface, so I settled on sewing
with cotton thread. It’s a game in some ways, an approximation of how I would
guess my own consciousness works to make a complete picture of an object. To
most of us, the world is not whole. It’s broken, and we each put it together as we
need it to be for us.’
‘Though I began photography with a concern for the surface of

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things,’ Grogg explains, ‘the work I do tends over time to violate surfaces and to look
for underlying structures that house the power for reminding us of
our interconnectedness and our mortality.’
For the After Ascension series, instead of gampi he used gelatin silver, ‘which meant
printing in the dark again, itself a mysterious and thrilling process. That practical
regard led me to think about what the gelatin silver print was doing to my images,
and that’s when I began to sew through them and smear them with mud and wax
and other materials. It’s that damned perfect surface again, which I rejected, that
forced me to look elsewhere for the essence of the image. I needed that tension in
the surface of the image to bring through the pleasure and horror of the secondary
hand, the second thought.’
Tethering is a recurrent motif in Grogg’s work. ‘I tend to think of addenda to

photographic images as dangerous territory. It’s really easy to overdo it. I use
stitching as an overt attempt at control, which seems to me absurd and also
beautiful, so I have not yet reached the point that I would say I have done too much
to the image, but that time will come.’
‘Contemporary mythologies shape

our apprehension of everyday reality’
Photographic intervention doesn’t have to involve laying hands on a physical

negative or print. David Birkin’s work is often the result of computer-based
manipulation.
Birkin’s great subject is war and loss. ‘The watershed came in 2004 when I went to
Afghanistan with a journalist to do a series of interviews with soldiers, aid workers
and politicians, including an NGO training female Afghan journalists, and the
Foreign Minister, who lent us his translator and bodyguard. We ended up meeting
the brother of Massoud, the legendary Lion of Panjshir, and watching George Bush
get re-elected over instant pancakes and synthetic maple syrup at the U.S. Embassy
in Kabul. We also went on patrols with the Army, and I got my first taste of the way
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the military practice of embedding works, and how it censors and skews the media’s
perception of a conflict.
‘Although I’d always been inspired by the work of war photographers like Don
McCullen and Philip Jones Griffiths, I knew that I didn’t want to be a photojournalist.
Something about the distortion that arises from freezing time and the complicity that
the photographer and viewer share in that process intrigued me, though, and it was
around the same time that I discovered Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of
Others, which really threw open the issue of aestheticized suffering and
spectatorship. By the time I started my MA at the Slade, I was reading people like
Judith Butler, W.J.T. Mitchell and Julian Stallabrass and trying to find a way to
articulate loss and the effects of war without recourse to spectacle.’
In his Profiles and Embedded series, Birkin says that he’s ‘using technology in a

purposely dysfunctional way to create a mismatch of language between the human
and the computer’. Profiles, he says, ‘is really about failure, and the frustration and
inadequacy of trying to meaningfully articulate loss on such a massive scale as the
Iraq War. For these installations, individual identification numbers from the Iraqi
civilian casualty database were expressed as digital colour values, exposed onto
10×8–inch photographic transparencies and displayed on hospital x-ray light
boxes.’ As Birkin notes meaningly on his website, ‘Due to an idiosyncrasy in the
encoding process, the colour mix is always dominated by red.’ In the case
of Embedded, the digital encoding process is deliberately disrupted. ‘Embedded
involves inserting people’s names into the image files of photographs that have been
the subject of a censorship or authorship debate, and then rendering the corrupted
JPEGs back into visual form.’ The images on the left-hand side of these image/text
diptyches are fractured by the introduction of the corrupted code on the right; the
words picked out in red on the right are the names and brief details of casualties
from a related conflict but where no visual record exists: photography in the service
of events not witnessed by a camera.
Issue 13
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This feature originally appeared in Issue 13
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Julie Cockburn, The Secret, 2012, hand embroidery on found photograph, 17.5cm x 12.5cm, private collection
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Julie Cockburn, Idyll, 2012, hand embroidery on found photograph, 23.3cm x 18.1cm,
private collection
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Charles Grogg, Victory, 2010, platinum/palladium on Japanese gampi, burned

hole, soot, 71.1 x 91.4 cm
David Birkin, Untitled, from the series Embedded, 2011. Two names from the Yad Vashem
Holocaust database inserted into the digital code of an image by an anonymous German
military photographer, rendered back into visual form and displayed as inkjet prints. 85 x 185
cm
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Charles Grogg, Subterraneus 2 (The Language I Didn’t Learn to Speak), 2010, gelatin silver
print, red cotton thread, needle, wax, 50.8 x 61 cm
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David Birkin, North Korean Refugee, from the series Confessions, 2012. The photograph’s exposure time
corresponds to the duration of the subject’s confession. Gelatin silver print, 60 x 40 inches MENU
Aliki Braine, White Out Sky 2, 2007, black and white photograph (black ink on
negative), 48 x 61 cm, courtesy of Aliki Braine/Troika Editions
Jorma Puranen, Icy Prospects 46, 2008, digital C-print, Diasec, 160 x 198 cm
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Jorma Puranen, Icy Prospects 31, 2007, digital C-print, Diasec, 160 x 198 cm
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Jorma Puranen, Sixteen Steps to Paradise 18, 2008, digital C-print, Diasec, 125 x 100 cm
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02/08/2019 Post-Photography: The Unknown Image - ELEPHANT

Post-Photography: The Unknown Image

This feature originally appeared in Issue 13.

‘Whatever it grants to vision and

If you’ re a photographer, there’ s no escaping the inﬂuence of Roland Barthes, or the

Art photography is not dead, but it is being hybridized.

‘You get to know an image really well

Original Compositions of Landscape (1785). ‘One of Cozens’s techniques is to make

‘There has always been a tension

aspects of photography’ MENU

‘The genre of landscape is so loaded. There’ s so much to contend with in terms of

Talmor has a long-standing interest in Pictorialism and the various

‘Perhaps the only reality to which

‘In Shadows, Reﬂections I was particularly interested in the resources

‘I like to call it having a conversation

Dafna Talmor is happy to discuss her practice of blending negatives in terms

but unlike painting, there is no going backwards–you can’t scrape oﬀ an embroidery

‘After a while the concern for just the

‘Though I began photography with a concern for the surface of

Tethering is a recurrent motif in Grogg’s work. ‘I tend to think of addenda to

‘Contemporary mythologies shape

Photographic intervention doesn’t have to involve laying hands on a physical

In his Proﬁles and Embedded series, Birkin says that he’s ‘using technology in a

This feature originally appeared in Issue 13

Charles Grogg, Victory, 2010, platinum/palladium on Japanese gampi, burned

Art as Geospatial Intelligence Gathering

Plastic Art in a Post-Plastic Age

Another Kind of Life: Photography on the

Paris and the Pain of Others

Keep in the loop

Get our weekly newsletter straight to your inbox

HUNGRY FOR MORE?

Life’s a (Liberating) Drag

Art’s Good-Hearted Harlots

Intents and Repurposes

Documenta14: Artists in Residence

Give and Take

Civilisation vs Civilisations: Who Wore it Better?

OUT NOW - Issue 39 - How Art Became

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