PATRICK POUND Photography and air
On Photography and Air by Patrick Pound
When we take a photograph we usually have a subject in mind, and in front of us. It is usually a fairly straight forward affair. When I collect photographs I also have a subject in mind. That subject may coincide with the photographer’s intention, or it may not. The photographer of each of my found images typically wants to capture something before his or her lens. With my photo-collecting I want to capture something I have in mind. I go looking for images that align with that idea. Photographers have a different motivation. When I put their photographs together I am looking for the things their photographs have in common and the various ways in which they can be found to hold my idea.
To photograph is to collect the world in the form of images. To make individual collections from these diverse and widespread collections is to think through the images of others and to share my findings on the observations of others; on their habits, their preferences and tropes. It is also to call to the fore the peculiar qualities of the medium of photography itself and to make observations regarding that medium. Photographs are peculiarly indexical. They are evidentiary. Susan Sontag famously claimed that photographs weren’t so much images of the world as they were pieces of it. She also noted that: “A photograph is both a pseudo presence and a token of absence.” [1] That is not to say that they are definitive or to deny that they too are interpretations of the world. Photographs are pliable pieces of evidence. We all know how a tiny piece of text can completely change the meaning of these slices of life. Like uncaptioned photographs, the photographs I find are the leftovers and the castaways from all of the world’s albums, the newspaper archives and the cinema industry. The camera tends to document without fear or favour, more or less, exactly what comes before its lens. Photographers choose what to fix within their mechanical frames. Painters on the other hand necessarily design their views and make them up, rendering things by hand. Painters don’t tend to accidentally include their thumb or their shadow in their
images. Vermeer may of course have left traces of his optical device that he seems to have employed to aid his compositions, in the halations we see painted into his highlights. [2] But he seems to be an exception. He may indeed be a prime example of the hand and the ‘camera’ meeting on the threshold.
people and things that are in some way affected by the wind – or the movement of air, or which hold an idea of the air in some way: from a candle in the breeze to a hovering plane, from an old sepia photograph of a yacht’s billowing sail to a snap of a young woman at the beach with the wind in her hair, or a bird in full flight.
Photographs are always photographic. They also tend to record things a little more factually. No one hires painters to record their wedding. No one presents paintings as evidence in court – unless the case is about forgery. The photograph typically privileges the subject over the hand of the photographer. En masse found photographs fall into categories depending on what they document. There are the cats and the dogs, the people with cats, and the people with dogs. The camera has a voracious appetite. It always comes back for more. From one hand to another the camera’s fat eye drinks it all in, one blink at a time.
The ways in which the air is recorded vary. The reference may be literal and illustrative as in the case of the snap of a man seen atop a building with his long hair blowing back, or it might be more ‘abstract’ as in the case of the little colour Kodak of an air traffic control tower. In the latter example the air is there by allusion, in the former it is ‘made visible’ conjured up by illusion as it were. When these photographs are placed in this particular set: we are drawn to think of the role of air in the photograph of the hovering eagle and in the clarinet in the boy’s hand in an albumen carte de visite. These images were not taken to record the effect of air. That was a by-product, or an aside, of these images.
My collections deliberately foreground the qualities that are peculiar to the medium. They also test their limits. Photography and air, seems to ask: in what ways can a photograph represent something we can’t see? It stands on the threshold between the cast and the mould; the thing and its representation. Air is the binding yet invisible element within this work.
Indeed one might think of these images as being lost to the wind. These family snaps and personal records are cast adrift. They are no longer wanted by their previous owners. They were all bought on eBay from countries across the globe, from Germany to Lebanon, England, France, the USA, Hungary and Israel, et al, right on down under to good old Australia.
The collection Photography and air consists of numerous images of
eBay is of course a great big deceased estate. It is also the junk shop writ large,
the international boot sale, le marché aux puces, der flohmarkt, as well as the divorcees’ division of property, and the home of the opportunistic offering up of the previously treasured. eBay is the great saleroom of the recently disregarded. I am interested in photographs of things you can’t see. I am interested in photography’s ability to make the absent present. I’m drawn to the reflection of the photographer in the glasses of her subject, and in the wing mirror of his car. Photography is the medium of record. It is a peculiarly indexical medium. Each image is lifted directly from the world. Its process is a kind of rubbing – a frottage of light. Each found photograph has its own say. Rearranged, and together, they can also be found to say some other things.
Notably, these photographs are all past their (initial) use by date. They are the recently redundant flotsam and jetsam of photography. I have taken these images and gathered them according to this single constraint. They are given a sabbatical from their original purpose. Here they are set a new task. They are put back to work. Another set of images accompanies Photography and air in this exhibition. There are five framed Giclee prints of scanned pairs of photographs. Each pair was found and bought on eBay. Each set marks a little narrative and relies on photography’s default position of stopping time in its tracks. In pairs these images rely on the before and after sequence of narration, and on the cause and effect implications of minor changes in these records before us, as narrative
(photographic) developments. Each pair is a photographic exchange. Tellingly, each pair records a change in things. Each set echoes how photographs, as physical things, might be found to variously record and document change. In Triple portrait we see a casual portrait of a man outside a building. We also see the shadow of the female photographer. In the next image we see a portrait of a woman up against the same building. We now also see the shadow of the man who was present in the first photograph. They have swapped places. In both of these images we also see another shadow. The shadow is of a third person. He is otherwise absent. He is a young boy with a cap on. He appears in both photographs only in shadow form. He was there, on the scene, but not
worthy of being photographed. He is a photographic disregard twice over. Behind the two adults, in both of the photographs we can just make out a sign on a sheet of paper posted on the glass of that door. One word can be deciphered. It reads: Fßhrer. Photography remains, after all, the evidentiary medium par excellence. The photographic record worries time and makes trouble for close readers. 1. Susan Sontag, On Photography, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1977, p. 16, 93. 2. See: Philip Steadman Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces, Oxford University Press, 2001. Despite its rather silly subtitle this is one of the more reasoned studies of the possible role of an early precursor of the camera, the camera obscura, in the easel paintings of Vermeer.
List of works front cover & pages 1-2, 4, 7, 8-9, 12-13: Photography and air, 2016 a collection of found photographs site specific installation unique $22,000 Triple Portrait, 2014 giclee print on archival rag paper 62 x 53cm edition of 10 + 2AP $2100 Ghost, 2016 giclee print on archival rag paper 62 x 53cm edition of 10 + 2AP $2100 The Umbrella, 2016 giclee print on archival rag paper 62 x 53cm edition of 10 + 2AP $2100 Prices include GST and exclude framing and freight Prices are subject to change
ISBN: 978-0-9946197-0-9