665 Making Prints with Light

665

Making Prints With Light s te ph en in ggs

665 Making Prints With Light stephen inggs

Published by the Michaelis School of Fine Art University of Cape Town 2011

Contents FOREWORD

Nigel Warburton

INTRODUCTION POLAROIDS

Stephen Inggs

STANFORD SERIES CONTINUUM SENSUM

1993

52

2000

64

JOURNEYS / RESIDUUM TRACES OF PRESENCE

LEGACY

2004 Virginia MacKenny

76 88 100

2006

STRANDVELD

28 40

1997

2002

SOLITUDE

08 18

1978 - 1987

A POETRY OF PLACES

06

110

2008

118

2011

TYPOLOGY OF PLACE

2008 - 2011

134

A MAKER OF IMAGES

Sean O’Toole

150

REFERENCES

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Foreword

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nigel warburton

A POETRY of OBJECTS

“I have more memories than if I had lived a thousand years” Charles-Pierre Baudelaire Objects that have passed through different hands, perhaps over generations, become worn, bear the traces of their use. The everyday paraphernalia that surrounded us in childhood becomes antique and quaint over time, yet it takes on a mythical significance in the stories we tell ourselves about where we have come from, stirring memories and feelings we may have forgotten we ever had, re-invoking scenarios buried deep in our psyches. Like dream symbols, such objects carry multiple meanings and have a powerful emotional resonance.

Abstracted, enlarged, and isolated from context, an old telephone, a pair of dress-maker’s shears, a few flowers in a make-shift vase, acquire an aura and presence both as objects of aesthetic attention and as catalysts for reimagining our own past or that of a previous generation. In Stephen Inggs’ museum of memory equivalents, each photographed relic invites a poetic reverie of personal associations that combines with more public connotations made precise by their South African origins.

This history of settlement and change is suggested but never laboured. Each image implies a particular relation to land, history, and a form of life, yet connects with universal

concerns about the evolving nature of our relationship to the place we find ourselves in and to the everyday items around us.

These are not objective re-presentations, but expressive and painterly invocations of a simpler existence that is no longer available; each is imbued with a sense of loss as well as beauty. The imperfect flowers have an individuality and fragility lost in an age of masscultivated hybrids. A hand-stitched rugby ball, with its dark-pored leather panels, has an organic quality its acrylic descendants can never achieve. There is no illusion of a mirror here, no transparent picture of what is in front of Inggs’ lens. It is, rather, as if he has coaxed and crafted these remarkable images into existence from his own unconscious rather than found them in the world. They are re-discoveries that while familiar, have become alien. The passing of time has changed everything.

NIGEL WARBURTON is an author and philosopher based in London

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Introduction

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STEPHEN INGGS

Work as Process Most artists at some point have to grapple with the relationship between form and content when making an artwork. As an artist who works in both print and photography, it is inevitable that I should be concerned how processes and techniques in these media influence the formal and aesthetic qualities of my work. This introduction is a discussion about how different technologies have influenced the making of my work rather than focussing on the conceptual and thematic concerns that inform it.

665, the enigmatic title of this book, refers to a type of Polaroid instant 1 film that is no longer produced and which I have used in the process of making much of my work since Stanford Series. In one sense, this book looks at a trajectory of my artistic production, but it also signifies the end of an era of a particular kind of analogue photography and marks the advent of digital photographic imaging in my own work.

Photography and printmaking’s inextricable relationship, which goes back to the invention of photography and later development of photographic printing processes, echoes my own engagement with both media since my early training as a student. Subsequently, the work I have produced throughout my career as an artist and in my teaching arena has been an exploration of the intersections between these two media.

Hence it should not come as any surprise that I place a particular emphasis on the making of work, as print and photographic media require an involvement with and understanding of technology and process in ways that differ from other disciplines in art. An important feature distinguishing printmaking and photography from other creative media is that the substrate, on which the image is made – the plate or negative – is not the work of art.

Moreover, the fact that the artwork does not reside in a single original, and that multiple copies can be made that are all originals, occupies a unique place in our understanding of art where original and copy are both controversial and contested terms.

A definition of an original work of art can be understood to mean that it has been created directly and personally by a particular artist and is not a copy or imitation. This is also true in printmaking and photography, but the plate or negative in these media, where the original image resides, is not the 1 In 2006 Polaroid discontinued type 665 film and in 2008 announced it was ceasing production of all instant film altogether.

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Stephen Inggs with first camera (1964) London

Polaroid 665 Black & White Instant Pack Film 10 Photos

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same as the corresponding print or photograph produced from it. Compounding this relationship between original and copy is the mimetic nature of photography and its representation of the real. What is relevant to my work is not photography or print’s reproducibility, but an interest in how process and personal perception can be combined to translate a re-presentation of something so as to make it original.

The liminal nature of making work in printmaking and analogue photography between what one thinks, what one sees and what one eventually creates, has had an impact on my thinking about and approach to making art.

The less direct and sequential nature of these media and processes means having to think more carefully about how to make an image, as there are many variables and elements of chance before arriving at the final work.

In discussing my work, I refer to its process as being entirely handmade unlike conventional analogue photography. Polaroid 665 film can also be likened to a printmaking process, as each print is pulled between rollers before being peeled apart, similar to the way an etching is pulled through a press and peeled from a plate. Different from commercially manufactured photographic printing papers, my work is made using cotton paper prepared by hand-painting gelatin silver emulsion onto its surface, followed by hand-processing and handfinishing, giving the prints a distinctive autographic quality. These handmade characteristics make it difficult to determine the technological identity of the work because it transgresses traditional boundaries between disciplines. But it is also the creative possibilities of interpretation in the use of light, degree of close-up, focus, angle of view, darkroom technique, as well as its being handmade, that shapes the appearance of the work.

Often imperfect because of the haptic nature of its production, my work is arguably closer to the visual traditions of hand-produced media like printmaking, drawing and painting than to the more mechanical features of photography. The aesthetic aspects of handmade production such as the tactile surface characteristics, mark-making, unpredictability and imperfection are particularly interesting in the context of the changing nature of photographic technology, where an image has become a form of text or data as a result of digital dematerialisation. Current contemporary forms of digital output2 are often largely indistinguishable from one another. The deliberate choice to embrace the handmade, tactile and physical aspects of my work, in contrast to 2 The output forms refer to inkjet or archival pigment prints where the spray pattern of the ink is identical regardless of the printer or substrate used.

Garth Walker (1978) Polaroid 665 photograph 8,5 x 10,8cm

Platform 2 (1978) Photo Etching 27,5 x 34cm

Reference for Another Camel Night (1984) Polaroid 665 photograph 8,5 x 10,8cm

Another Camel Night (1984) Lithograph 52 x 69cm

technical perfection, reflect my content and process as well as underlining conceptual references to history, transience and the overlooked. And as independent writer and critic Lyle Rexer argues, “Digital imaging is the ultimate symbol of depersonification, a process in which the immaterial and abstract (data) is substituted for the tangible and expressive (the negative, the print), which ideally forms the basis of human transaction. The photograph is a handmade object that can be directly and physically exchanged between people.”

(Rexer 2002:74) I am not suggesting here that digital imaging has no place in contemporary art practice, but arguing for the values and aesthetics of handmade photographic processes to be considered as a good way of developing a “…sense of a photograph as a physical object, not a text, a visual mystery, not a message, a stimulus to imagine, not a summons used to halt time” (Rexer 2002:93).

The processes of photographing objects as still lives and shifting them from the locus of obscurity to the locus of display, underlines the way that it is possible for an artist to transform an object’s value, and confer a canonical status to something that has been previously overlooked. Working in this way, allows me to explore how analysis and creative translation can generate meaning.

In depicting objects my intention is to produce visual images that are free from specific contextual constraints. The absence of any convincing threedimensional perspectival space in my images gives them a particular concentration. Working with a medium format Mamiya RZ camera I photograph objects as if in a collapsed space. Everything behind the images is eliminated, suggesting they have no worldly context and resembling what art historian Norman Bryson notes as “the capacity for isolating a purely aesthetic space.

Still life is in a sense the great anti-Albertian genre. What it opposes is the idea of the canvas as a window on the world, leading to a distant view. The further zone must be suppressed if still life is to create its principal spatial: nearness” (1990:81).

While these cognitive processes cannot be inscribed on an image, they do help form and develop its meaning. In my work, I try to infuse the images with beauty, to explore the tension between a highly mediated photographic image and the visceral immediacy and materiality of a painterly surface, to try and make the ordinary marvellous.

South Beach Durban (circa 1970s) Postcard

Untitled (1979) Photograph 9 x 14cm

Glimpses (1980) Hand-printed booklet Letterpress 29,7 x 21cm

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Watering Can (2000) Polaroid 665 negative Polaroid 665 print 8,5 x 10,8cm

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Watering Can (2000) High-resolution scan from Polaroid 665 Negative

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Watering Can (2000) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Detail: Watering Can (2000) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Brush (2004) and Butternut (2000) Polaroid 665 negatives

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Brush (2004) and Butternut (2000) Polaroid 665 prints

Polaroids

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1978 - 1987

SX-70 Polaroid My interest in photography and Polaroid film as a way of making images developed when I was an art student in the mid-1970s. Although I had begun experimenting with a Polaroid 330 camera belonging to the art school, it was only when fellow student and best friend Garth Walker and I bought our own Polaroid SX-70 cameras that the exciting possibilities for the exploration of instant photography emerged.

As art students, we could only afford the bottom-of-the-range plastic model of the SX-70 camera, and a pack of ten-picture film was costly, raising the stakes for every shot we took. Influenced by the likes of Andy Warhol, Lucas Samaras and Guy Bourdin, who were the SX-70 art photographers of the day, we set about photographing anything that had the potential to make a good image. The object was to see if we could successfully transform everyday subject matter into miniature works of art.

SX-70 Polaroid was considered cuttingedge technology at the time and developed a cult following. The film developed automatically in broad daylight producing rich, brightly coloured square-format jewel-like images,

laminated under a plastic layer and framed by a white border. A feature of the film was that it could be manipulated while developing, allowing one to create effects by drawing on the plastic layer. But it was the extraordinary, magical quality of SX-70, its iridescent colour and creative possibilities that drew me to the medium.

My Polaroids have never previously been shown because they were used mainly as source material for works I made in other media.

But they also hint at concerns that emerged in later projects. SX-70 film played a significant role in developing my work because of its inherent aesthetic and somewhat unpredictable material print qualities that challenged the prevailing paradigm of photography at the time.

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Untitled (1986 and 1978) SX-70 Polaroids 10,8cm x 8,5cm

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Untitled (1982) SX-70 Polaroids 10,8cm x 8,5cm

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Untitled, Paris (1987) Polaroid 669 prints 10,8cm x 8,5cm

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Untitled (1982 and 1978) SX-70 Polaroids 10,8cm x 8,5cm

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Untitled (1982) SX-70 Polaroids 10,8cm x 8,5cm

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Untitled, Paris (1987) Polaroid 669 prints 10,8cm x 8,5cm

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Untitled (1978 and 1985) SX-70 Polaroids 10,8cm x 8,5cm

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Untitled, Paris (1987) Polaroid 669 print 8,5cm x 10,8cm

Poetry of Places

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1993

Poetry of Places developed from a romantic preoccupation with the architecture of high-rise buildings along the Atlantic Seaboard in Cape Town. In the urban landscape unrelated architectural styles are forced into strange juxtapositions through unpredictable development, renovation and construction. But what interested me was a poetic sensibility evoked by the dramatic play of light on architectural forms at particular times of the day.

While photographing many buildings along the seafront, I simplified the structures using light, shadowed planes and tonal distribution to give greater emphasis to any expressive possibilities. Photographic theorist Sabine Kriebel makes the point that “although photography’s material base is a mechanical and chemical process, the medium offers a melancholy poetics – traces of things and places that-have-been ….” (Kriebel 2008:20). The idea of trace interests me not only in its residual meaning but also in the sense of trying to find or discover something through investigation.

To this end, the series explores ways of transforming the banal evidence of urban landscape into a poetic expression of place.

Literary critic Walter Benjamin said of Eugene Atget's early-1900s photography of deserted Paris streets that he “photographed them like scenes of a crime for the purpose of establishing evidence” (Benjamin 1979:228).

This evidentiary quality of photography was an area of exploration that developed in my work, particularly in the way close-ups and enlargement can be used to reveal and make things more visible. In printing, making the scale of the work as large as possible draws attention to the formal and contextual presence of buildings and their permanence.

A chance processing accident that happened to some of my negatives during processing resulted in a reticulated visual quality to the photographs, which advanced the idea of photographic emulsion as being equivalent to a skin. This concept of skin and the way it corresponds with the human aging led me to think about these works as portraits of domestic architecture in which buildings could be re-imagined as a reflection on time.

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Tower (1993) Lithograph 217cm x 105cm

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NY Lofts (1989) Drawing 56 x 76cm

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Balconies (1989) Drawing 56 x 76cm

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Open Window (1989) Drawing 56 x 76cm

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Shelbourne (1993) Lithograph 69 x 52cm

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Untilted (1993) Silver gelatin fibre print 60,5 x 51cm

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Untilted (1993) Silver gelatin fibre print 51 x 60,5cm

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Untilted (1993) Silver gelatin fibre print 60,5 x 51cm

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Untilted (1993) Silver gelatin fibre print 51 x 60,5cm

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Untilted (1993) Silver gelatin fibre print 51 x 60,5cm

Stanford Series

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1997

The impetus for this series was a particular fascination with the discovery, whilst weekend gardening at Stanford, of found 19th-century Staffordshire ceramic shards and their reference as remnants of history and culture.

These surviving traces of past cultural production are reminders of the transience of artifacts in the way they have become fragments of debris but at the same time have left an indelible impact and influence on society.

The shards have a significant historical reference to the cultural colonisation of the Cape by the Dutch, through the trade route to Batavia in the East, and later by the British.

The images refer to information about the natural terrain, such as topography, rivers and land cover, and man-made infrastructures such as roads and buildings. These topographical views refer to the land in terms of structures and divisions, and the wealth generated through the production of farming or the erection of buildings.

During the 19th-century before municipal garbage collection, solid waste was simply tossed into the garden away from the house. This was fortuitous for me because finding these long since discarded shards set in motion a process of scavenging that extended to collecting other objects that subsequently found their way into the series. In making these images I looked for a way of creating a visual correspondence with the unearthing of the shards by photographing them against black velvet to suggest the absence of light of their

burial. The absorption of light by the velvet ensured a maximum density of black in the prints, which in addition to their massive enlargement gives the shards a jewel-like presence and intensity.

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Stanford Series XVll (1997) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 65 x 50cm

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Stanford Series XXV (1997) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 50 x 60cm

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Stanford Series V (1997) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 65 x 50cm

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Stanford Series XX (1997) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 65 x 50cm

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Stanford Series XlV (1997) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 65 x 50cm

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Stanford Series Xlll (1997) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 65 x 50cm

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Stanford Series XXVlll (1997) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 65 x 50cm

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Stanford Series XXVll (1997) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 65 x 50cm

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Stanford Series Vlll (1997) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 65 x 50cm

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Stanford Series Xlll (1997) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 65 x 50cm

Continuum

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2000

Continuum engages in a kind of ‘archaeographical’ process of finding, collecting and recording, exploring the use of found objects as emblems of transience. But whereas previously the objects in Stanford Series were unearthed, the objects in Continuum come from a broader surface investigation in and around the village of Stanford. They are mostly humble objects derived from material culture and nature; enamel jugs and plates, tarnished spoons, vegetables and zoological detritus.

These basic forms have remained virtually unchanged over time and refer historically, culturally and environmentally to the world that produced them.

Art historian Norman Bryson in his book Looking at the Overlooked makes reference to rhopography, a term used mainly in painting, but applicable to my work, to describe the depiction of subject matter considered insignificant or trivial, such as still life. Bryson suggests that “rhopography finds the truth of human life in those things which greatness overlooks, the ordinariness of daily routine and the anonymous, creatural life of the table” (Bryson 1990:61).

Continuum is not intended as way of memorialising objects, but rather should be seen as an investigation into finding beauty in the mundane. My interest was in transforming the intrinsically humble genre of still life from merely representing reality to presenting an image so that it seems more wonderful, more intriguing and better than the objects themselves.

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Watering Can (2000) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Clock (2000) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Bucket (2000) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Bucket ll (2000) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Jug (2000) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Plate (2000) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Spoons (2000) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Stone (2000) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Frog (2000) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Wing (2000) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

Sensum

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2002

Sensum was indirectly inspired by an anecdote about a partially sighted man living in the village of Stanford who occasionally worked on the roof of his home, under the supervision and direction of his wife standing below. At a garage sale held by his wife some months after his death, I bought several of his hand tools. The love and care evident in the tender repairs to these sad-looking tools imparted them with an aesthetic presence that inspired me to photograph them as subject matter. What this suggested to me was how objects and their images can have a metonymic association and even trigger an empathic response.

A central theme in both the Sensum and Continuum series is the investigation of classes of objects with common characteristics according to type. This typological approach to the work looks at the comparative analysis of structural and formal characteristics and the way “objects are seen as one of several ways of narrating the past” (Pearce 1994:21). The message or meaning that each individual image offers in the series is incomplete, but the collective body of images broadly engages questions of transience, history and meaning.

What interested me in this series was the challenge of transforming the ordinary into the sublime and the idea of memory associatively connected to objects. Susan Pearce, a professor of museum studies, speaks of “the emotional potency which undoubtedly resides in many supposedly dead objects” (1994:26). She goes on to suggest that our relationship with the material culture of the past is inextricably bound to the way we construct our present. The title Sensum (also referred to as sense-datum) is a term in philosophy that refers to an immediate object of perception, which is not a material object; a sense impression.

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Wire (2002) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Letters (2002) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Torch (2002) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Fan (2002) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Roses (2002) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Still Life with Stompie (2002) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Box (2002) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Canvas (2002) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Tools (2002) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Horns l (2002) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

Traces of Presence

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virginia mackenny

Stephen Inggs is perhaps best known as an artist working in photography and print who records the quotidian objects of South African history and place with a sensuous attention to detail. Photographing an old jug, a bucket of proteas, hand tools, a pile of books or a bundle of fence wire, he isolates the ordinary, centralises it and elevates it beyond its mundane status in largescale prints.

Inggs’ obvious reverence for what his viewfinder frames and his concomitant highly aesthetic images may lead the casual observer to be seduced into an apparently comforting nostalgia. The sacralising focus of Inggs’ lens, however, creates icons of the everyday and points to more serious concerns. Recording attrition in the minutiae of erosion and abrasion of surface, his choice of subjects, with its lexicon of clocks, skulls, stones and flowers, is similar in many ways to Dutch 17th-century vanitas painting, reminding us of time and hence our own mortality.

For the purposes of this essay I would like to focus on two particular works that Inggs produced in 2006 that, I proffer, act as a fulcrum for many of his concerns. The two works in question are part of the series Solitude and are 100 Years of Solitude I and 100 Years of Solitude II. The first is an image of a section of two pages of a diary handwritten in ink. The second is the blotting paper, thick and absorbent, used to secure the pen’s trace in the diary.

Although, or perhaps because these two prints differ in a number of respects from much of his work produced since the Continuum series of 2000, they prove useful in considering the wider concerns of his oeuvre.

Firstly, it is notably rare for Inggs to give a work a title that is anything but simply descriptive. His normal mode of titling isolates the object, much as his lens does, and gives it a general identification; Wire (2002), Roses (2002), Books (2003), Large Rose (2004), Fence I (2006), etc. His chosen objects, while sometimes loosely identified with a generic ‘times past’, are not situated in a specific history. Without particularising dates, they reassure one of the repetitive continuity of ordinary life.

In the case of 100 Years of Solitude I and II the title is not literal 1, neither is it Inggs’ own. It references the eponymous novel by Nobel Prizewinning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, first published in Spanish 1 Another instance of a more open titling occurs in the same series Solitude where Inggs has designated images of the open Karoo landscape, not with their specific place names, but as Terra Incognita I , Terra Incognita II and Terra Incognita III . The implication of a larger field of reference to lands unknown, as labelled in maps of the sixteenth century, has implications for a broader reading of his production.

Books (2004) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Tools (2002) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

100 Years of Solitude l (2006) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

100 Years of Solitude ll (2006) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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in 1967. 100 Years of Solitude introduced Latin American magic realism to a larger audience and tells the story of a family living in the fictional town of Macondo. In the novel time itself is a central player. It often seems to lapse, stop or repeat itself. As it moves on its apparently infinitely fluid course, the clarity of logical chronology is lost and the intersections of different elements of the story overlay each other. Critical to Inggs’ use of the book’s title for his images of the diary pages and blotter is the reference to extended solitary time and the idea of synchronous realities.

100 Years of Solitude I and II (2006) have their genesis in one of Inggs’ forays into the Karoo in the Western Cape where he engaged a farm manager in conversation. Asked if there was anything that he might know of, or have, that could be of interest to the artist, the manager presented Inggs with several diaries that had been found in an abandoned farmhouse. Over a century old, the entries were written by an English-speaking farmer's wife in what Inggs describes as a “particularly unemotional style of prose”2. In one of the entries, for example, she notes that she had given birth to a son and immediately after that she lists what the labourers had harvested from the fields that day. Stated as simple matters of fact without hierarchy or apparent attachment, these notations serve, for Inggs, as a reflection of a stoicism borne out of having to endure the hardship of farming this semi-desert region.

The privations of such a life are underlined by his choice of diary for 100 Years of Solitude I. An extra copy from a previous year was put to use the next year by crossing out the original dates and rewriting the new ones in by hand. While on one level the use of the preceding year’s diary speaks, for Inggs, of the “frugality of existence” 3 his choice of it, with its handwritten date overwriting the printed one, serves as a pointer to a variety of concerns in his work.

In documenting the diary, Inggs breaks with his habit of isolating the complete object of his focus in the middle of his format. As if noting a seamless continuity from one year to the next, the diary pages are not presented in their entirety – the margins on all sides are cropped, randomly ending with a dispersed edge. While the text can be read and one can make out descriptions of the weather, “partly cloudy all day”, and sentences such as “Jacob did a little mealie shelling” and “Collyer paid me for two bags of barley”, the truncated 2

Email interview with the artist October 3, 2009.

3

Ibid.

borders of the pages means we are rarely privy to the full copy of the events of any day. Inggs’ focus seems to be less on the content of the text and more on the fact of the handwriting itself and the implications of replication and overwriting.

Handwriting, as subject, has signature implications. As Sonja Neef and José van Dijck point out in their book Sign Here!: Handwriting In The Age Of New Media, it “always gets its cultural authority from its claim of springing from a physical and living hand – a claim Benjamin would call the undividable ‘here and now’ of presence” (Neef & van Dijck 2006:15). They further assert that this contemporaneous presence “holds even if the subject of writing is no longer there, as Derrida emphasises, ‘even after death’ (1988:5)” (in Neef & van Dijck 2006:15).

The now deceased author of Inggs’ diary is thus still, in a sense, present – embedded, as it were, in the autographic script that marks the fact that she was, once, here. Inggs is clearly interested in such a presence, but this is not all he is engaged with in this work. If only interested in notions of authentic presence, he could for instance, have chosen to present the original diary as found object. Instead he chooses to re-present it and the method of his doing so is telling and multivalent.

Using an indexical 4 medium such as photography, and in Inggs’ case the Polaroid photograph, as his primary means of recording the diary ensures that the presence of the author continues to be signalled, albeit by proxy, and at one remove. The immediacy and directness of this mode of documentation is, however, somewhat disrupted by Inggs’ decision not to present his photographs of the found object as final work but, instead, to process the image again. He paints cotton rag paper with gelatin silver photographic emulsion, allowing him both to transfer the image and enlarge it. This intervention into the presentation of the image has a number of implications.

On one level it takes the viewer yet another step away from the object depicted but also alerts one to the performance of making and viewing an image.

Inggs’ act of re-presentation is also an act of “remediation”, where the object is not only re-presented, but the media of its representation is changed. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, in their now classic book ReMediation 4 Peirce’s term ‘indexicality’ refers to the physical relationship between the object photographed and the resulting image. Photography is “indexical insofar as the represented object is ‘imprinted’ by light and the chemical (or more recently electronic) process on the image, creating a visual likeness with a degree of accuracy and “truthfulness” unattainable in purely iconic signs such as painting, drawing, or sculpture” (Sadowski 2009:1).

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explore how new types of media re-interpret and concurrently re-form other media, and, consequently, shift their uses and meanings. Bolter and Grusin’s concerns are picked up by Neef and van Dijck in their exploration of handwritten text when they ask what happens “when script is performed in a second medium?” (Neef and van Dijck 2006:13). In Inggs’ case, the question would need to be expanded to enquire what happens when script is performed in a third medium?

In order to particularise the answer it is necessary to engage the hybridity of Inggs’ production as a photographer/printmaker. Inggs’ interest in both photographic documentation and fine art printing interweaves two needs: the need to record an object and the need to make an image, not simply reproduce one. These needs are inextricably intertwined and, as Bolter and Grusin point out, “the process of remediation makes us aware that all media are at one level a ‘play of signs’” (Bolter and Grusin 1999:18). It is in this play of signs that Inggs’ work finds its rationale.

If one turns to the companion piece of 100 Years of Solitude I, this focus is exemplified. 100 Years of Solitude II records a simple gesture from a time when texts were written with quills or fountain pens and the residual ink was blotted to stop it from smudging. In the case of this piece, like the image of the diary pages, Inggs is not interested in the content per se of the text – which is, in this instance of course, indecipherable. He acknowledges, however, that his response to the blotter comes from its visible manifestation of “the idea of the trace” and he openly enjoys “the printerly qualities embodied in its materiality”. 5 The sullied blotting paper, carrying a script never meant to be read, marks, like spoor, the track and presence of the writer. It is the residual impression of something that was once written, like the diary pages, but is already at one step removed and, in addition, reversed. It has, in essence, most of the characteristics of a print, bar the intention to create something for public perusal.

This image of a fragment of throwaway paper with its palimpsest of blotted marks embodies Inggs’ fascination with trace, sign, testimony, imprint, erasure, representation and history. It is, in essence, a singularly succinct manifestation of the play between autographic and allographic 6 forms of artmaking.

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Email interview with the artist October 3, 2009.

Key to this of course is the original handwriting in the diary. While handwriting is probably generally considered the most preeminent form of autographic representation, Neef and van Dijck argue that handwriting also occupies both territories. They posit that its “specific materiality qualifies the handwritten text as allographic and autographic at once; its semiotics unfolds in this in-between-media, as ‘text-image’ or as ‘image-text’” (Neef & van Dijck 2006:13). It is perhaps easiest to understand text as image in illuminated manuscripts. It is in such manuscripts that “the large initial capital letters may be elaborately decorated, but they still constitute part of the text itself, and we are challenged to appreciate the integration of text and image” (Bolter & Grusin 1999:12). Neef and van Dijck, however, push the argument for handwriting’s hybridity further. They assert that “moreover, handwriting as a specific form of writing emphasising the individual …, finds an audible pendant in the voice, which is as un- exchangeable as handwriting. Because of this audible dimension, handwriting may also appear as a ‘sound-image’.” (Neef and van Dijck 2006:13) Here handwriting is “mediated” because it is a hybrid medium composed of visual (writing), audible (speech), and verbal (language) media.

Handwriting’s hybrid status becomes particularly visible when it is incorporated in another medium – when it is thus literally “re-mediated” (Neef and van Dijck 2006:13).

If handwriting is an intermeshing of image, sound and text it follows that in the re-mediation of the diary pages Inggs’ prints open up a complex play of visual and verbal intertextuality. Printmaking is, according to Goodman’s definition, a stage two or allographic art, in that the artwork does not reside in one unique original as does a painting, but can exist in many reproductions. He notes that a work can only be effectively defined as autographic if “even the most exact duplication of it does not … count as genuine” (Goodman 1976:113). Any work that is done in one stage remains autographic, any work that requires a second stage to realise its completion is allographic.

6 These terms, examined in depth by Nelson Goodman in his Languages Of Art: An Approach To A Theory Of Symbols , mark the distinction between a “one-stage art i.e. painting where the end product is the art (autographic) and two-stage art i.e. music where the score can be reprinted/ reproduced (allographic) yet the art is in the playing/concert” (Goodman 1976:114).

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Brush (2004) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

According to Goodman, however, printmaking occupies a special position for, while being overtly allographic, it is “yet autographic”7 (Goodman 1976:114).

Prints, he says, are the “end-products; and although they may differ appreciably from one another, all are instances of the original work” (Goodman 1976:114).

If even multiples can be originals, so too can copies. In this play between the original and its mediated form there is an oscillation “between immediacy and hypermediacy, between transparency and opacity” (Bolter & Grusin 1999:18). In the processes of production in the representation of the diary script another hand is now foregrounded – Inggs’ own. The presence of the artist’s hand, directly signalled in the irregularities of the brush marks of the emulsion, not only disturbs the coherence of the surface of the image, but also becomes the sign of another authorial hand, thereby upsetting the notion of a singular point of origin for the handwritten text/image.

Thus it is in the particularities of gesture, the autographic mark, that the printmaker asserts his primary presence. Interestingly this, in itself, marks yet another shift in mediation given that it occurs through an action that references the traditional discipline of painting.

Inggs’ interest in painting as a subtext in his production is also evident in Canvas (2002) and Brush (2004). The most standard of signifiers of traditional artistic production, the paintbrush, is presented in a straightforward fashion8 while the canvas is seen, not from the front, but from the back. Complete with its wedges, and the name of the company that distributed it – Waltons – it speaks of its provenance as a canvas per se, rather than as a painting by someone. Because it is turned away from us we are not privy to the image on its surface, indeed, if there even is one. Thus reversed, it remains an open field of speculation – a place of pictorial imagining and therefore useful to Inggs, the printmaker, used to the play with inversion in the manifestation of images. Here the print both creates, and denies, access to the picture.

An image that has no overt or apparent reference to artistic practice is Sea (2006). Included in the series Solitude, Sea, however, embodies a 7 In his discussion on etching he furthers his point noting that “even the most exact copy produced otherwise than by printing from that plate counts not as an original but as an imitation or forgery” (Goodman 1976:114).

Canvas (2002) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

8 It is perhaps important to note that while Brush is apparently presented in a simple manner, it is part of Journeys , a series where Inggs chose to rephotograph most of the images as suspended from bulldog clips. This deviation from his normal method of presenting the images overtly emphasises their ‘objectness’ as prints or constructed images.

similarity in form to the fluidity of paint and/or the photographic emulsion Inggs uses to produce his images.

In Sea the image of the water fills the page edge to edge, sans horizon.

The zone where the image stops and the paper is seen once again is ragged and indeterminate, defined in part by the irregular form of the waves and then again by the mark of the loosely brushed-on gelatin silver emulsion. The gelatin silver holds the image, but where the brush fails to deposit emulsion on the paper, pictorial content drops out altogether, leaving an image that disperses/dissolves at the edges. This reiteration of edge is particularly evident at the lower perimeter of the image. Here Inggs generates a number of transitions towards the limit of the paper, each one marking the making of the print in its various manifestations. The edge of the image laps at the edge of the photographic emulsion, which is defined by the edge of the Polaroid.

The Polaroid in its turn is situated on the edge of the actual page of the print which, being a 100% cotton rag paper, has a deckle edge, thereby softening the definition of the termination of the page.

This constant reiteration of edge gently traces the perimeter of the seen object/field. The image is framed and reframed through the processes of its own making. Much as an icon will have multiple haloes around a centralised image helping to focus the worshipper’s eye and mind for prayer, Inggs’ borders alert us to image as central subject. Contrary to creating certitude however, Inggs’ manifold edges create doubt as to where the actual image stops or starts. It deters conviction and alerts us each time to another possible point of origin in the process of production.

This image of the sea is unique in Inggs’ oeuvre.9 While his work abounds with dry Karoo landscapes, he only once takes us to this fluid place of the unmarkable. Casper David Friedrich’s Monk By the Sea (1809-10), with its lone figure facing the grey void of the open sea ahead of him, is echoed here as we, the viewers this time, are left staring at this surface with no place of anchorage. While Inggs’ images of domestic items secure the viewer in the quotidian, the sea is emblematic of constant flux and the vast unknown.

Sea bears a surprising visual similitude to 100 Hundred Years of Solitude I. The similarities between them are multiple and not evident in any other image in Inggs’ production. Particular to both images is the fact that 9 Inggs did produce a number of images of the sea in his earlier work when he resided in Durban during the late 70s and when he first came to Cape Town in 1985, but most of these referenced the beach and the manmade structures that are prevalent in many a seaside town. None were just of the sea itself and this seems to be the only direct image of the sea in his work post 2000.

Sea (2006) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Detail: Sea (2006) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, c. 1809, oil on canvas, 110 x 171.5 cm Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Mussen, Berlin

Sea (2006) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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100 Years of Solitude l (2006) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

neither of them presents the edge of an object to view. Both images deny the viewer a horizon line, and both have an emphasis on horizontality emphasised by repetitively delineated parallel markings – in one the waves, in the other the lines of text. The lack of defining edge in both images implies an infinite extension or continuum – one natural, the other human10 – and possibly posits a connection between the two.

Pointedly however, the organic nature of the handwritten text is interrupted by the clean-cut upright seam of the binding. This line that runs from top to bottom bifurcating the pages, introduces an understated compositional intersection between the horizontal and the vertical elements of the image. It animates the play between passive and active, underlining human activity in the production of both the diary and Inggs’ image of it.

Such intersections are apparent throughout the play of images in Inggs’ production both formally and figuratively and often come unexpectedly and work at a number of levels.

Inggs’ inclusion of an image of the sea amongst his Karoo artefacts and landscapes may seem strange, unless one is aware that over 250 million years ago the Karoo was covered by an inland sea. The Karoo basin with its sedimentary deposits is one of the richest repositories of the earth’s history on the planet. It spans “a time period from the Late Carboniferous (300 million years ago) to the Early Jurassic (180 million years ago) and preserves a worldclass assemblage of fossils” (Rubidge 2007:1). Perhaps then it is less surprising that in the only other image where Inggs references the ocean, it is represented by proxy and in the fixed and finite form of a fossil. Fossil (2006)11 is an image of a fossilised coelacanth – rendered forever set in its bed of stone. Long thought to be extinct, 12 the coelacanth is now known to survive in the depths of the ocean off the east coast of southern Africa and around Indonesia.

Virtually unchanged for the last 380 million years, it is often described as a living fossil and in both its living form and in the rock it functions as trace, as an imprint of the past.

10 Inggs’ interest in an extended seamless field is initially signalled by his series of objects in Continuum (2000). Each object, however, occupies the centre of the format and none follow the compositional decisions of Sea or 100 Years of Solitude I .

11 Fossil is in the same series Solitude in which Sea and 100 Hundred Years of Solitude I and II are found.

Fossil ll (2006) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

12 The coelacanth was first discovered in a fossil form dated 400 million years back. In 1938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer discovered one in a fisherman’s catch off the coast of East London. A number have now been caught and colonies have been sighted in Sodwana Bay and off the Comores, Madagascar and Indonesia.

Inggs’ fascination with the lineage of forms and traces of history, both human and natural, provides a continuing dialogue throughout his work.

In 100 Years of Solitude I and II a specific linearity in the handwritten text transcribes and demarcates human presence, but linearity as an indicator of human activity manifests itself in myriad ways in Inggs’ work. Straight lines inscribed on the landscape impose boundaries as in Fence I (2006) and the track of a dirt road cutting across the country as in Road Anysberg (2008) are familiar indicators of human activity. Smaller, more random, individual instances of the trace of the hand, while not literally drawn, may evoke the scrawled or scribbled mark and are evident in such tasks as the winding up of a bundle of string or wire.

Such marking of activity is documented by Inggs, who has an eye for isomorphic correspondences between human production and the natural world. These visual similarities, while apparently random, once highlighted, posit a widening field of representation that acknowledges a kinship between human activity and natural process. The activity of a bird building its home in Nest (2000) might have an affinity with Wire (2002) much as does Wire Bundle (2006) with the pattern of tree growth in De Hoop Landscape (2007).

Visual similarity in otherwise disparate objects may lead one to expand one’s notion of the potential links across images and dissolve the hierarchy between things. As Barbara Maria Stafford in her book Visual Analogy suggests, such work asks the viewer to draw on their analogising powers and “discern synecdochic connections between fragments from the past and the disjunctive appearances of the present” (Stafford 2001:41).

In summation the two prints 100 Years of Solitude I and II are pivotal in Inggs’ oeuvre because they provide a place where many of his ideas revolve.

An artefact discovered on one of his forays into the Karoo, the found diary, unique and individual, provides original copy. The word ‘copy’, in this sense simply means ‘text’, as in the record provided by the diary writer. The word ‘copy’ however, slips anchor from the security of its position as original when it also functions as a verb. Inggs activates this when he photographically documents and prints his work, thereby replicating the diary pages. The diary is, in itself, however, already a copy from a previous year. Overwritten in the original, Inggs’ print provides a visible stratification of the layers of its reproduction, tracing the sedimentation of each process. By allowing the framing edge of each process to be visible, the levels of re-presentation become apparent. The handwritten text, already an imprint, is re-presented thrice

Fence l (2006) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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String (2002) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

De Hoop Landscape (2008) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

removed from the original in Inggs’ print. 13 But the primacy of the hand is activated yet again, from the other end of the process, when Inggs brushes the photographic emulsion onto the paper thereby signalling his hand in, and authorship of, the image.

Inggs regards the diary, “in the context of extreme isolation and solitude”, as serving to “act as a means of defining one's existence.”14 The print with its autographic/allographic hybridity links Inggs to the writer of the diary, perhaps to the writers of many diaries, where each of us inscribes our mark, leaving our trace, defining our presence in the face of isolation.

VIRGINIA MACKENNY is an artist and writer based at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town

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13 In the image of the blotter in 100 Years of Solitude II it might be argued that the final print is four times removed from the original – an interesting conundrum for Plato.

14 Email interview with the artist October 3, 2009.

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100 Years of Solitude l (2006) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

100 Years of Solitude ll (2006) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

Journeys / Residuum

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2004

Journeys/Residuum was intended as the last series in a trilogy of exhibitions that explored the discursive nature of objects and the way they can have meaning that is not necessarily inherent in the objects or landscapes themselves. The potential of objects and images to act as signs, to signify aspects of society and culture outside of their physical characteristics is something that fascinates me and inspires my work.

The images that comprise Journeys/Residuum are the result of a deep attraction to and love of photographing objects, natural forms and landscapes. Looking for and finding correspondences and connections between images and other things can influence unforeseen meaning in the work. This provisional quality and potential for more than one meaning, whether consciously activated or not, is often the reason why I am drawn to photograph a particular object or landscape.

Rosalind Krauss refers to the indexical nature of the photograph, in addition to other terms she uses like trace, imprint and transfer, to suggest the inextricable relationship between a photographic image and thing it stands in for.

But it is not only this kind of trace between the print and the negative that interests me. Rather, it is the way in which objects and landscapes can hold or suggest traces of existence, of what has been left behind, that compels me to photograph them.

The title of the series comes from one of the images, Journeys and Researches, in which an old book is photographed without its hard cover revealing the title and introduction by the author explorer David Livingstone. Not only did the book title and content interest me for obvious reasons, but also its appearance had an isomorphic correspondence with a lithographic stone which was the printing process for many books at that time. The meaning of the word residuum is a substance or thing that is left behind. This double title encapsulates the two concerns that informed the creative production of the series.

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Tricycle (2004) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Trophies (2004) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Wire Basket (2004) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Wooden Pegs (2004) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Journeys and Researches (2004) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Books (2004) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Footpath (2004) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Bot River Landscape (2004) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Fencepost (2004) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Trough (2004) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

Solitude

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2006

Solitude is series of work informed by both ancient and recent history scored and inscribed into the landscape of the Karoo. Traces left on the land are visual evidence of millennia of history as well as more recent events, ranging from ancient fossils and Bushman rock paintings to wire fences erected by farmers in the 1800s.

In this vast, inhospitable and mysterious terrain the sense of isolation and solitude is palpable and confronts the psyche and imagination very directly. The visual intensity of the land and its corresponding air of isolation provided the starting point for my engagement with the Karoo and simultaneously with personal questions around the meaning and impact of solitude as a way of being. I wanted to capture something of the emotional and spiritual register of the landscape of the Karoo, where – in a sense – time seems to stand still. It is a place constructed as much in the imagination as it is by the processes of millions of years of pre-history, reaching back to a time long before the advent of mankind. Once an inland sea, the Karoo has links with Antarctica in that identical fossils from the early Triassic have been found in both locations.1 What I find intriguing about this connection is a sense of

similarly extreme climatic conditions, as well as the remoteness from other inhabited areas that both locations share even after eons of geographic separation.

My experience suggested the idea of a visual narrative, reminiscent of a palimpsest, that would not only be referenced through the exterior physical landscape and selected found objects, but also through the expression of my own emotional interior, in this way describing my personal account of the meaning, value and impact of solitude. Olive Schreiner (Ralph Iron) writes of the Karoo’s “oppressive beauty” in The Story of an African Farm but more often than not her descriptions of the landscape are a metaphor for a journey that is inward and selfdiscovering. What I am suggesting here is that on one level my work also acts self-referentially as a metaphor for my own personal experience.

1 A research team in 2003 led by palaeontologist Roger Smith of Iziko South African Museum made the discovery of a curled-up skeleton, Thrinaxodon lihorhinus , on top of Graphite Peak in Antarctica. Identical fossils are also found in the Karoo.

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Fence l (2006) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Gate l (2006) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Terra Incognito lll (2006) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Terra Incognito l (2006) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Aloe (2006) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Wire Bundle (2006) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Chair (2006) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Hat Mould (2006) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

Strandveld

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2008

Strandveld series has as its origin two road trips — one a coastal route connecting lighthouses along the Southern Cape, the other inland through the little Karoo. These excursions provided an opportunity to meditate on notions of place and time, particularly the unmappable, immeasurable sense of the highly evocative landscapes. As French anthropologist Marc Augé observes, places “want to be — people want them to be — places of identity, of relations and of history; they have a principle of meaning for those inhabiting them, and intelligibility for those observing them.”

(Augé 1995:52) In its literal translation, Strandveld makes reference to a particular region in the Western Cape where the borders between the shoreline and inland have blurred to produce a unique biome. Experienced in its raw isolation and immensity, this landscape of strange juxtapositions compels contemplation of the nature of place and time — both physical (existence, absence) and metaphysical (identity, otherness, context). As a title to this body of work, however, Strandveld extends from its geographical reference and gestures towards a paradoxical co-existence between two fundamentally divergent places.

It was during my own journey through these landscapes that I came across an arcane museum of found and donated objects that referenced historical events in the Strandveld region. Inspired by this idiosyncratic collection of material, I photographed a selection of objects from the museum that for me evoked a sense of place and history for this series.

As a body of work, Strandveld series can be read as an archive of time and place. It is the nexus of a constantly expanding anthology of the overlooked. In my work recording these places and things that are inherently transient gives credence not just to “the places marked by road signs and maps, but also the less tangible but no less meaningful places forged in the crucible of memory, longing and desire” (Golden 2001:20).

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Propeller (2008) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Coral (2008) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Clouds (2008) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Nasturtium (2008) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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De Hoop Landscape (2008) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Anysberg Road (2008) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

Legacy

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2011

The dual meaning of the word legacy can imply a bequest, or a consequence, of something that has been left behind or handed down by a predecessor. Objects that have survived or been passed down over generations also leave a legacy that tells us something about history and memory and the meaning we attach to it. In some cases objects have been witness to or complicit in events and as such are a record of that event or period.

Certain objects can be considered to be part of a cultural archive and, in the context of South African history and memory, can have the potential to remind and act against forgetfulness about the past.

Making what I consider to be photographic portraits of objects, particularly those that are less common, is another way of engaging with these concerns and an attempt to make ordinary things meaningful. This body of work relates to previous series in that the objects have personal associations, yet connect with broader questions about our relationship to objects that surround us and the context in which they exist.

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Shovel (2011) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Shovel Close-Up (2011) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Rugby Ball (2011) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Tyre (2011) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Telephone Variant (2009) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Primus 1 (2011) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Secateurs (2011) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Shears (2009) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Bits (2011) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Glove (2011) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Supreme Court (2011) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Rhinoceros Skull (2011) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Longboard (2011) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

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Wildedagga (2011) Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper 120cm x 107cm

Typology of Place

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2008 - 2011

Typology of Place was developed from a series of field trips to the Northern Cape. During these journeys, the relationship between the names, regions and visual appearance of different places became a compelling line of enquiry in itself.

Attempting to address the idea of place, by revealing and questioning commonly held assumptions about land, home and national identity, is the central focus of the project.

The notion of landscape as wilderness, a place of imagination and freedom, conjures a powerful image of psychological liberation and escape from the ideological structures of society.

Historically, South Africa has been inscribed by a topographical taxonomy that has spiritual, ideological and colonial meanings and associations by virtue of the naming process.

Recording, describing and mapping the landscape visually to create a typology can be seen as analogous to using language to assign meaning to places. Just as hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, trekboers and British settlers assigned particular meaning to places and ways to think about them through naming, so do visual images of places tell stories that define our real and imagined lives, and in the process visually construct meaning.

Many places described on maps, both historical and contemporary, refer to a taxonomy of landscape that may or may not still exist because of progressive agricultural and social development or regional climatic advances. This process of progression suggests that what might once have existed is perhaps no longer present, suggesting a possible dislocation between name and place.

Another aspect of the work is the way in which colour can assign identity to place. The particular palette of different regions in the landscape, for example the pale yellow hues of the grass and contrasting red earth of the Kalahari, could be argued as a signifier of place in the same way that area names assign identity.

By linking visual appearance including colour with area names as well as objects in developing a typology of place, I have tried to imagine a way of seeing that differs from previous visions of landscape in South Africa.

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Road Anysberg, Klein Karoo (2008) Digital print with archival ink on paper 111,8 x 134cm

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Anysberg l, Klein Karoo (2008) Digital print with archival ink on paper 111,8 x 134cm

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Anysberg ll, Klein Karoo (2008) Digital print with archival ink on paper 111,8 x 134cm

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Korannaberge, Gordonia (2009) Digital print with archival ink on paper 80,5 x 111,8cm

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Sprinbokoog, Kaiingsveld (2010) Digital print with archival ink on paper 80,5 x 111,8cm

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Hantam (2011) Digital print with archival ink on paper 80,5 x 111,8cm

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Boesmanland (2009) Digital print with archival ink on paper 80,5 x 111,8cm

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Bosluis se Pan, Boesmanland (2009) Digital print with archival ink on paper 80,5 x 111,8cm

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Rietfontein se Pan, Boesmanland (2011) Digital print with archival ink on paper 80,5 x 111,8cm

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Bosduif, Kaaingsveld (2009) Digital print with archival ink on paper 80,5 x 111,8cm

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Swartruggens, Ceres Karoo (2010) Digital print with archival ink on paper 80,5 x 111,8cm

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Soetanysberg, Rooistrandveld (2010) Digital print with archival ink on paper 80,5 x 111,8cm

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Rooistranveld (2010) Digital print with archival ink on paper 80,5 x 111,8cm

A Maker of Images

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sean o’toole

Stephen Inggs in conversation with Sean O’Toole SO: Your Polaroid series marks your start as a practicing photographer. What attracted you to work with Polaroid? It offers instantaneity but also comes with defined constraints, like a limited focal range, lack of sharpness and muted colouration.

SI: Many of the photographs I was taking at that time were source material for images in printmaking; I was working with high-contrast line film, essentially converting photographic images into printmaking images. Much later, when I realised how much work I was doing in photography, I began to let the images stand in their own right, but it took me a long time to come to that particular understanding. I think I’m a printmaker who came to photography with a love of images in print and have continued to work in that way. In many ways I see photography as a part of printmaking rather than the other way round, because one is simply making a print with light. You’re working with chemistry and light, as opposed to a press, but you’re still making a print, just using a different set of technologies. To answer your question, I always loved the materiality of Polaroid. It has a mystique, which is something that really attracted me to the medium. I also liked the idea of the unique image, the instant nature of it, and the fact that it can be manipulated in a number of different ways, which was unlike film in those days where you simply put a roll of film into a camera and only saw the results after the film was processed. Transparencies delayed the materialisation process considerably, in the

sense that once processed they were subject to an edit process, following which the image was sent for scanning and then printed. It is a long wait. Polaroid offered a whole different way of working. When I was a student in Durban in the late 1970s, fine art photography hadn’t yet become an acceptance medium in its own right.

Nobody was thinking about photography in the way that it was being thought about elsewhere at that time. Even using photographs in the production of prints was considered somewhat controversial. Anything that involved mechanical reproduction or photographic process was viewed with suspicion.

SO: It’s interesting what you say about the relationship between the two disciplines. To what extent have your abilities as a printmaker assisted you as a photographer, and, conversely, how has photography benefitted your practice as a printmaker?

SI: Being a printmaker working as a photographer you are always aware that one has to interpret the photographic material into another stage, take it into another set of materials, whether it is a photo lithograph, screenprint or etching. That shift in translation brings about another meaning to the image; the transition and translation into another material brings about another way of seeing. With some of the Polaroids there were defined ideas that I was trying to record. They subsequently made their way into my first exhibition. My interest was still very much in print, but my SX-70 Polaroids largely informed the prints that I made.

A lot of the Polaroids from the 1980s, especially,

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were made as South Africa was heading towards a State of Emergency, a time when everything looked ominous and had a sinister reading to it.

Having done my stint in the military I felt a sense of trepidation, which in retrospect I think I was trying to reflect in my work. I had just recently returned from the UK, where I had done a postgraduate diploma in printmaking. I was uncertain about the future in South Africa and what that meant. My interest in signs, a private property notice set in front of an empty landscape, for example, reflects this.

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SO: Your Poetry of Places (1993) series immerses the viewer in an architectural and urban experience of place. Where were you were living at the time?

SI: On the Atlantic Seaboard. I used to do a lot of walking along the seafront promenade, where to my mind there is a certain kind of nostalgic, historical feel to the architectural form of the buildings, also something that echoes many other cities fronting onto the sea around the world. I was interested in the work of Edward Hopper at that time and particularly drawn to his urban landscapes, the absence of human presence – humans were implied rather than inserted as an obvious fact.

SO: It’s interesting that you mention Hopper, especially since there is an unmistakable point of view operating here, by which I mean your use of horizontal, vertical and oblique angles. It is almost inconceivable to think of these sorts of views before Moholy-Nagy or Rodchenko. How much of an influence has classic western modernism, especially photographic modernism,

exerted on your imagination? Some South African artists seem to rely entirely on it for quotations.

SI: At art school modernism was the predominant paradigm, so it was an influence, whether conscious or not, and definitely informs the production of my work.

SO: The series includes some works in which the linear qualities of the architecture is distorted. Can you talk a bit more about these particular works?

SI: I was working on source material for this series and had dropped off a roll of black and white film at the lab to be processed. Something in the process went completely haywire, resulting in the emulsion lifting away from the film base, leaving a broken, distorted image. Initially I was quite annoyed, but then I suddenly thought it was amazing because it highlighted the material nature of the photographic process. I decided to use the film to make a series of prints. I think what intrigued me was the fact that lightsensitive emulsion is really only a thin membrane that adheres to a substrate, be it film, paper or whatever. I started investigating this idea further and it led me to work with light sensitive emulsion on paper, which I used in my next series looking at overlooked objects.

SO: Stanford Series takes shape around fragments of 19th-century ceramics excavated at your house in Stanford. What intrigued you about the objects, intrigued you enough to want to photograph them?

SI: On one level it was interest in collecting that drew me to them. In and of themselves, the fragments were too small to do anything with, so I felt the need to examine them more closely, make them larger in my own mind.

SO: Compared to your earlier photographic work, where you are very much a shy urban voyeur, your latter work, starting with the Stanford Series, demonstrates the precision of a scientist.

Would you accept this analysis?

SI: Yes, I think that is a fair comment. The objects had a jewel-like presence but the real challenge was how to evoke that in a photograph. I decided to photograph them on a black velvet backdrop because it absorbs light and doesn’t reflect – it is the ultimate black ground. I had also just recently bought a new camera, a used Mamiya RZ67 medium-format single-lens reflex camera, which I spotted in the window of a photographic shop on Long Street. The beauty of this particular camera is that it’s really a box; it’s three-sided and you put a prism on top, a lens in the front and any one of a variety of backs. From my experience working in fashion photography, I knew that many professionals like Patrick Demarchelier and Annie Leibovitz were using one too. The RZ gave one a certain amount of flexibility, unlike a 4” x 5” view camera, which is much more painstaking to set up. The RZ lenses also have particularly good optics and are razor sharp. I had recently built a daylight studio at home, modelled along the lines of Irving Penn’s Worlds in a Small Room (1974) with South-facing natural light. Penn’s project intrigued me on two levels: firstly the

anthropological approach, but also the quality of the natural light. It was astonishing to me how he could achieve that kind of subtlety of light, something that wasn’t a concern in a lot of photography. The painterly quality of Penn’s use of light really inspired me to try and achieve a magical quality of light in my work.

SO: One of Penn’s achievements is how he foregrounds his subjects through simple devices like white backdrops.

SI: Yes, and similarly the black backdrop, in my case, was an important element in this series, because I wanted to take the objects out of the typical photographic frame. I was interested in the conventions of the photographic still life, removing the objects from their context. I didn’t want the viewer to be looking through a window.

I quite liked the idea of these things coming out of the darkness. If you show something on a black background there’s no context any longer and you are forced to look at the object in a different kind of way. Making the object much bigger, exaggerating its scale, also allowed me to engage with it differently. I was reading art historian and theorist Norman Bryson at the time, and particularly liked his ideas around still life being concerned with the small, incidental things in life, as opposed to a grand narrative. But, and this goes back to something I said earlier, I also enjoyed the idea of working with an instant negative, so that if you wanted to make any kind of correction or adjustment you could do it right there and then. It wasn’t a case of waiting until the film got back from the lab and you’ve already forgotten about that

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image and it is a re-connection with what you’ve done. This way of working was immediate and quite strongly process-driven. Once the print has been made it very much exists as an object in and of itself – more than just an image. I think very often photography just exists as an image, as dematerialised things printed in a magazine, book or on the web. For me the idea of a photograph having a physical presence in the same way that an artwork has a physical presence is appealing.

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SO: In art historical terms, your work from this period onwards demonstrates a strong interest in the genre of still life. What about this genre appeals to you?

SI: I think the idea of overlooked objects appealed to me. For me, objects, particularly old objects which are worn and have been used and had a function previous, retain a history and have the ability to trigger some kind of response in terms of memory. Whatever one might think about them, others will apply different readings.

Particularly in a South African context, one can look at certain things and associate them with a particular past. For me this series is important because it also marked the start of what is an ongoing interest: typology, how we understand things in relationship to one another. I have a preference for very singular objects, although I have occasionally extended beyond that. For example, in my Solitude series I photographed a diary written by a farmer’s wife in 1904 where the edges of the page extend beyond the frame of the photograph. Although I find 17th-Century Dutch and Spanish still life painting intriguing,

I’m not that interested in constructing and staging an image in that way. It’s not really an area of interest for me.

SO: The domestic objects in the Continuum series of work prompt a defined reading, as do the clock and two dead animals. To what extent do you want the images you portray to be read as metaphoric rather than factual?

SI: I want elements of both, although I would personally probably lean more towards a metaphoric rather than a factual reading.

SO: Polaroids are small. Did the change to a larger substrate ever prompt any hesitation?

SI: No! I’ll tell you why. While on sabbatical in the USA just before I started working on this series I was lucky to see a Jasper Johns print retrospective at MoMA. It was an absolutely wonderful show and inspirational for me on many levels. The complexity and scale of his prints blew me away – I had never before seen prints that could compete with paintings. When I returned to Cape Town I set myself the challenge of making my work bigger.

SO: Did the larger scale arouse interest amongst your audience?

SI: Yes. Often when people first see my work (emulsion prints) they are uncertain as to what they are – if they are prints, photographs, paintings or drawings. They can be difficult to identify technologically because they have elements of all those mediums. The first prints

that I made in the series weren’t as technically developed and often I worked on them with drawing because of what I couldn’t get out of the process at the time.

SO: There is an obvious relationship between the trilogy Continuum, Sensum and Residuum.

Sensum reads like an obvious extension of your Continuum series, with domestic objects figured in great detail. Yet, when you see Residuum you realise that it pre-empts your more recent work.

What made you decide to allow context and the landscape to flood your Residuum series?

SI: I started to ask myself how I could make an image of an object in a context, but not in the conventional sense of the photographic frame.

One day while driving around on the back roads of Stanford looking for images, I noticed a fence post with wires tightly bound around it. Here was an object in a landscape that I was interested in trying to portray as a tree trunk, not a fence post, but present it in a way where the context was not too specific as to overtly prescribe how the viewer should read it as an image.

SO: The groups of trophies and wooden pegs remind me of your bottle caps that appear in Continuum. In your view, what does multitude offer that we won’t see in a singular image?

Relationship is an obvious answer, but is there any other reason for adopting this approach to composition?

SI: I think what interests me is not whether the objects are presented as singular or multiple, but the act of collection itself. I identify with

how Walker Evans often photographed what he collected. It’s another way of looking at objects that have been collected, for whatever reason, because one has a particular response to them in that context. I like the idea of wooden tent pegs, for example, making a reference to landscape without being in the landscape itself.

I’m much more interested in making an image than I am in simply capturing the image.

SO: The semi-arid landscapes of South Africa, particularly the Karoo, have drawn many artists and photographers to depict them. Was there any particular set of characteristics that drew you to image this landscape?

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SI: This series was prefaced by research and experimentation. I read Olive Schreiner’s account of the Karoo in her novel The Story of an African Farm (1883) and also tried to immerse myself, imaginatively, in the history of the Karoo, as it was both then and millions of years ago when it was an inland sea. Although many ideas filtered into the work, some images, however, are triggered by specific incidents. For example, driving in the Northern Cape recently I came across a wind pump – I find them fascinating – this one was not any more remarkable than any other, but what did intrigue me was its shadow, the projection of the structure onto the landscape, which was far more interesting than the actual object itself. I continued driving for a while thinking about it, then stopped, drove back and photographed the shadow.

SO: You’ve mentioned Schreiner, but were there any artists who worked in the Karoo – or in

similar environments elsewhere – that perhaps interested you?

SI: Yes, I was thinking about equivalents. Ansel Adams in Yosemite might be an example. I think that there is something incredible about being in a very primitive landscape like the Karoo because it does have this huge pre-history. It doesn’t seem to have changed all that significantly – there are a few farms, but it is largely uninhabited, a vast solitude. It is wilderness, a frontier where you can imagine yourself in all sorts of ways.

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SO: Despite one or two nominally abstract pictures in the Strandveld series – the photographs of the clouds in this series, or your seascape in the Solitude series – you are indubitably a figurative photographer. You figure verifiable subjects: phones, scissors, measuring tapes, propellers, stones. Unless one takes time to speak with you and find out about the relationship between these objects, their relationship can appear quite cryptic, their meaning discrete rather than collective.

SI: When I started working on the landscape series I wanted to engage place much more; it wasn’t singularly about a set of objects recorded photographically. I was trying to develop a typology of place. What emerged, and it is still formulating itself, is this idea of naming in relation to a landscape, be it evidence of human habitation or intervention. When early travellers came to South Africa they tried to claim ownership and power over the land, of which there are many traces. J. M. Coetzee has written

about this subject, about the desire amongst, particularly, white South Africans to find a language to fit Africa, a language that could be authentically African. The quest for an authentic language is pursued within a framework in which language, consciousness and landscape are interrelated. I find this interesting. As an artist with an interest in landscape and overlooked objects, I am working towards creating my own authentic interpretation – rather than language – of the South African landscape.

SO: Colour is an obvious point of departure in your recent series, Typology of Place, but I’d like to start by remarking on your anti-iconic evocation of this landscape. These are quintessentially anti-romantic studies.

SI: Yes. SO: I remember William Kentridge telling me that it was only when he had reconciled himself to the fact that Johannesburg is ugly and it is not the European landscape that he was able to draw it.

SI: That’s a point worth noting, because much of the South African landscape is not beautiful in the romantic sense; it’s actually quite harsh and barren, which interests me. Can one find something in that? Can one find a way of imaginatively evoking it? That’s the challenge.

SO: You’ve returned to colour after many years.

Was it difficult working with colour again?

SI: This is an interesting question because of two things that happened. One relates to the materiality of making: the 665 film that I have been using was discontinued in 2006. At the time I bought up a whole lot of remaining stock but eventually that’s coming to an end. This happened in the context of the advent of digital photography and processes. In 2009, I bought a Canon 5D digital SLR, which in some ways is like going back to 35mm photography. It is a much easier format to work with because of its portability and it’s facilitated a transition back into colour.

career, from working with Polaroid to now making photographs using digital technology – I think specifically of your 17-metre, digitally composited panoramic landscape that you installed at the South African Museum in November 2010 – change is not something that you resist.

SO: Was this series made using a digital camera?

SEAN O’TOOLE is a journalist and writer based in Cape Town

SI: Some images in the series were shot on film – Kodak Portra 160NC. It’s not that I eschew digital processes – I am now working with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, a photo management and editing software package that allows you to establish your work in collections – but I don’t necessarily see digital images as being an end product, not in the way some photographers do by abdicating the print process to a lab or master printer. I like the materiality of print, the physical investment it requires coating paper and then dragging it down to the darkroom.

There’s a lot of effort in this sort of making. I suppose the making aspect in the production of art is very important for me.

SO: A final question. Polaroid is now effectively a defunct technology and film is pretty much a specialist medium. Artistic practice, to be vital and meaningful, has to adapt to new technologies. Given the arc of your photographic

SI: Not at all, it doesn’t worry me in the least. In fact, I welcome it because it forces me to change and grow as an artist too.

This is an edited transcript of two interviews conducted at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town, July 17 and November 4, 2010.

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References Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso.

Benjamin, Walter. 1979. Illuminations. London: Fontana.

Bolter, Jay and Grusin, Richard. 1999. ReMediation - Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Bryson, Norman. 1990. Looking at the Overlooked. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Golden, Thelma. 2001. Art:21 - Art in the Twenty-First Century, Volume 1. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

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Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages Of Art: An Approach To A Theory Of Symbols. 2nd ed.

Indianapolis: Hackett.

Krauss, Rosalind. 2008. Notes on the Index: Part 1 in Kriebel, Sabine. 2008. In Elkins, J. Photography Theory: The Art Seminar. New York: Routledge.

Kriebel, Sabine. 2008. In Elkins, J. Photography Theory: The Art Seminar. New York: Routledge.

Neef, Sonja; van Dijck, José; Ketelaar, Eric; Ketelaar, F. C. J. 2006. Sign Here!: Handwriting in the Age of New Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Pearce, Susan M. 1994. Interpreting Objects and Collections. London and New York: Routledge.

Rubidge, Bruce. 2009. “The Karoo, A Geological And Palaeontological Superlative: Economic Potential of deep history”. Participation in Interprovincial Conference on Creative Tourism in the Karoo. Implication for 2010 and beyond. Gariep. Invited Paper.

Sadowski, Piotr. 2009. “The Iconic Indexicality of Photography”. Paper delivered at The Seventh Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature, Toronto, 9-14 June 2009.

Stafford, Barbara, Maria. 2001. Visual Analogy – Consciousness as the Art of Connecting.

Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Acknowledgements My sincere thanks and appreciation go to all who have made this book possible, especially friends, colleagues and family: Garth Walker, Virginia MacKenny, Sean O’Toole, Nigel Warburton, Marcus Bury, Vanessa Inggs, Fritha Langerman, Pippa Skotnes, Russell Jones, André van Wyk, Daryll Pienaar, Natasha Norman and Andrea Steer.

Grateful acknowledgement for funding from: The National Research Foundation University of Cape Town 159

This book was published on the occasion of Stephen Inggs’ exhibition Legacy in a limited edition of 500 copies: 400 softcover 100 hardcover, 25 in a collector’s edition All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the publisher or copyright holders. © 2011 The copyright of each essay rests with each individual author as credited. © All Artwork and photographs – Stephen Inggs Published by Michaelis School of Fine Art 31-37 Orange Street Gardens Cape Town 8001 South Africa Designed by Garth Walker Production by Scan Shop Printing by Hansa Press Binding by GraphiCraft ISBN number: 978-0-620-51872-7 Printed and bound in South Africa

In memory of my father Donald Inggs, family photographer, Leica devotee, and the one who started me on my journey.

stephen inggs was born in Cape Town in 1955 and grew up in Johannesburg, London and Umbogintwini on the South coast of Kwa-Zulu Natal. He studied Fine Art in Durban at Technikon Natal , where he was awarded the Emma Smith Scholarship for overseas study, Brighton Polytechnic and the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg where he completed an MA(FA) degree.

In 1985, Inggs joined the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town where he is now an Associate Professor and Director of the School. He regularly holds solo exhibitions of his creative work in London, Cape Town and Johannesburg. His work has been included in numerous international group exhibitions and he was a prize-winner at the International Print Triennial in Krakow, Poland in 2003.

Inggs has also curated numerous print portfolios, produced and published an artists’ book on the art and technique of lithography and co-convened the 3rd Impact International Printmaking Conference in 2003. His work is held in private and public collections locally and abroad including Iziko South African National Gallery, Durban Art Gallery, University of Cape Town, Northwestern University, RMB, MTN, Sanlam, Liberty and Standard Bank, the Library of Congress and the Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian, Ralph Lauren and Takashimaya.