Re: Landscape by Viewfinder Photography Gallery

Re: Landscapei

Exhibition catalogue includes an interview with the photographer and images from the exhibition

Karen Grainger

Photographs by:

Published by:

Karen Grainger info@karengrainger.co.uk www.karengrainger.co.uk

Viewfinder Photography Gallery Linear House, Peyton Place, off Royal Hill, Greenwich, London SE10 8RS

Interview by: www.viewfinder.org.uk Kathleen Brey assistant@viewfinder.org.uk Louise Forrester louise@viewfinder.org.uk Curated by: Louise Forrester louise@viewfinder.org.uk Edited by: Anne-Marie Glasheen editor@viewfinder.org.uk Design by: Mandana Ahmadvazir designer@viewfinder.org.uk

First published February 2010 ÂŠ The artists and authors. The views expressed in this publication are not necessarily the views of the publisher or the editors.

Introduction

Re: Landscape presents illusory photographs of English rural scenes and coastlines. Using mirrors when photographing each landscape, Karen Grainger blurs the boundary between the reflected and the real. The resulting compositions feature subtle interruptions to more striking disturbances that complicate any normal, easy viewing. In each case, the images provide a compelling perspective on what often remains unseen outside of the frame. In some images, the mirror plane could almost be read as mirage or mist; in others, the image is evidently reflected but the mirrorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s size and location is hard to pin down. The mirror is also used to refract and distort, duplicating trees and tilting pathways. These startling works call the viewers' attention to the processes of reading and seeing images. At first glance, the images appear to be conventional landscapes but soon reveal inconsistencies and improbabilities. Rather than being invited to simply gaze into the landscape, the viewer is presented with an image that challenges representation. Curator Louise Forrester comments: "I'm very excited about presenting this innovative work. The photographer invites us to share the game of understanding her landscapes, of imagining how they might have been produced â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the sophisticated images are striking, and are sure to delight." The artist's use of mirrors stems from her interest in the photograph as both object and image; the mirror standing as a metaphor for the photograph; both being materially limited but visually infinite. The work appears impossible in its composition, but each breach of reality only points to limitless possibility.

Interview with Karen Grainger by Kathleen Brey and Louise Forrester

• What attracts you to photographing landscapes? 6

I think landscape as a genre is one of the classic subjects that we have always been drawn to representing in art; there’s a long tradition of depicting our surroundings, historically in painting and now more predominately within photography. However the simple act of selecting and framing a portion of what we see out there, has always been driven by a complex set of social and cultural influences and neither the selection of the view to be framed nor the beauty we appreciate, is as natural as many believe. Because of this, I find the past and contemporary motivations of artists, everyday photographers and their social and cultural influences particularly interesting, worth observing and responding to. That said, I actually avoided taking photographs outdoors for many years. Having seen so many paintings, so many photographs in magazines, calendars, watched tourists taking endless shots of the same scene, I considered it fairly pointless to join in. For a while, I purposely didn’t carry a camera when visiting places or going on walks. I would pride myself in trying to experience the moment of being in that place, really trying to take it in as a whole, to really register it, even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to recall that experience effectively later. It seemed so much better a thing to do than to always be clicking away at everything; as though seeing the images relayed back confirmed you had been there. A strange dependency on seeing by proxy. It was also a sense of frustration at how more day-to-day landscape images were made and used to inform an imagined experience of the world that prompted me to experiment with a different way of looking at or engaging with our surroundings. I wondered if you could see something else of the world if you looked indirectly, a quick glance to catch something less restricted by boundaries that’s missed when we stare straight ahead. That’s when I started experimenting with mirrors. • Do the particular landscapes you photograph have any specific meaning for you? Initially I’d say no, not in a personal sense. They are places that are or were local to me that I chose as representative ‘types’ of landscapes; the forest, the field, the river, the coastline. However, the majority of the works in this exhibition are taken on the Isle of Wight, where I now live when I’m not in London. The varied geology and terrain of its 26 mile span has generated a microcosm of many English-ish vistas.

That’s not to say that I don’t get anything from actually being in those places, but I engage very differently with an area if I intend to make work: the place moves to being located inside my head rather than my head being out in the place. • Have you found that photographing landscapes presents any challenges? On a practical level, the main challenge so far has been one of transporting mirrors as well as my camera kit on foot when exploring a location. I started off carrying them underarm, but could only manage smaller mirrors that way, so I eventually rigged up a cart, based on an old golf-cart wheel-base. The mirrors could be strapped to that and wheeled along. The terrain was sometimes hard to navigate though and if I came across a style, I had to take everything off, carry it over and tie it back on again. I was conscious of looking a bit odd, wheeling mirrors around; if I came across other people, they would always be curious as to what I was up to, there was a strange performative element going on at times. Choosing exactly where to start shooting at a site, was also problematic and sometimes didn’t bear fruit. The process I used with the mirrors was based on not being able to pre-visualise the shot, being blind to the image that could normally be seen. Although this meant I had to let go of the usual tight control over my work, what it did do was set up a situation that was open to greater potential. I really got a buzz from what could be discovered through the camera lens this way. I compare the experience of taking images in this way to a return to a time of innocence in photography, similar to when photography was a new invention and being used for the first time by someone like Henry Fox Talbot; those early exposures and the thrill of the images being revealed to sight for the first time. In that sense, I think these works are definitely an attempt at a new way of seeing photographically, in a time when we’re visually jaded, we’re hungry for the new, but we’ve surely seen it all before. • Can you describe the process of incorporating mirrors in your image making? The images are all made ‘in camera’ and ‘in situ’. That is to say that mirrors are taken to a place and positioned in a variety of ways in front of the camera’s field of view until such time that an image of interest is formed (often just glimpsed for a second) and taken. The size of the mirror varies, as does its distance from the camera’s lens. An important part of the work is that you aren’t exactly sure where the mirror is within the composition, or within the image’s apparent space and depth. It's not grounded, it's not trying to be an earthwork, it's not visibly of that place any more than the camera itself is at that point in time. • Why do you choose to play with distortion in image making? I’ve always been interested in the photograph’s image-space or more precisely its apparent depth-space. Although many people

take it as a given, I am drawn to the miracle of the photograph as being something that presents the appearance of reality on a twodimensional plane, that simultaneously colludes with you to defy this with the reading of infinite depth.

Traditionally and certainly within an art exhibition context, photographs are experienced as paper objects, carefully preserved and presented in frames. In books and magazines they are still located in and on the paper-thin surface of the page. They are picked up, held, turned over, a tactile experience that perhaps goes some way to registering their contradictory condition. Today, we increasingly consume images through digital surfaces, the computer, the TV, the mobile; what little previously registered on the paper surface could now be said to be more or less absent, a transiently lit surface, where images come and go. An objective, therefore, has been to somehow disturb the reading of the image depth-space; for example to bring a normally receding plane, up steeper towards the eye or to try to make something register at the surface as we look through. Some acknowledgement of the photograph’s anatomy if you like and given its ‘perfect’ nature, I felt this could be done by intervening without losing the beauty or the pleasure we get from looking at photography. • The effects range from being obviously reflections to very subtle interactions - did you have particular effects in mind or was the experimentation a more organic process? Firstly, I’ve been surprised to discover that different people perceive the images in different ways. Some people deduce the mirrored aspect and what it is doing within the image-space straight away, other people ‘misread’ the compositions (although there is no right or wrong way to read them) or have difficulty re-arranging what they are looking at if they are subsequently told about the use of mirrors or indeed which portion of the image is mirror. What I hope most people do, is look longer at the images and exercise their deductive abilities switching from perceiving the composition as a whole ‘view’, to looking at the alternative portions and conceiving or imagining the constituent parts as more oblique volumes that contain space from outside the frame. When building up works for this series, the development was intentionally process-led and in that sense organic. Although as works were building up, I would consciously choose which to include and which to omit. It felt important to build a reasonable range of interventions. I would generally look for some aspect in an image that was different from the last in some way. I imagined myself as an exhibition visitor, looking through several on a wall, and decided how they would work as a group informing the interpretation of each other. When shooting over time, taking things to a subtler level seemed appropriate for a while to see what that did to the exercise of reading the image. So too did reverting back to a more blatant

intervention where the mirror casts off its camouflage again and almost blocks the eye’s progress into the space. • The photographs play games with the viewer by blurring the line between what's 'real' and what's created or reflected - is that an important element of the work for you? Yes, more or less. Of course the mirror’s reflection is no less real than the photograph, which is itself a reflection through a lens in the first place. Photography’s failings as an accurate document of true reality is well recorded. It is now often said that it represents ‘a’ reality or ‘realities’. On a material or technical level for example, the photograph has many flaws generated by lens distortions, the input of the element of time as an exposure is made, the varying quality of the receiving surface of chemical film or digital back etc., to mention only the first stage of the making of a photograph. In a similar way, the mirror echoes that aspect in the work. In places, some more visible than others; where it carries a green taint for example, the focus is at odds with the rest of the scene, it sometimes fractures the reflection or carries ghost traces of itself. What mainly establishes the mirror’s presence in the work though are its edges. All the mirrors I work with have beveled edges, a feature I really love. At times it will be a simple blur, at others a complex smearing or shearing of the image. Occasionally it will catch the light with highlight spots which resemble the sun in the sky and the associated lens flare that arises when shooting directly into it. Conceptually, it makes me think of the indistinct zone at the edges of our peripheral vision; or the fuzzy edges of photography’s images after travelling through the lens but before being trimmed off by the viewfinder, the film format, the CCD chip, the screen, the print… Retrospectively, I find it amusing that the beveled edges can be said to literally ‘blur the boundary between the reflected and the real’. I didn’t set out for that to happen. On a related note though, I feel strongly that photography still holds one truth, despite all the flaws mentioned, one thing that defines it and sets it apart from other forms of representation: and that is its indexicality. The index is the registering of an image, the causal aspect of an image; light being reflected from objects, travelling to and then imprinting onto a sensitive surface. It may be the most unrecognizable distorted image, but one thing is undeniable, as Roland Barthes put it: ‘that-has-been’1. Because of this I’m not setting out to undermine photography as a dependable representational art form. I feel it still has more potential yet to reflect, beyond what we’ve experienced so far.

• How does incorporating mirrors in the installation itself change the experience for viewers?

In the large frames with the mirror ‘cladding’ to the outer frame edges, I wanted to extend the intervention of the mirror into the physical presentation of the work. I had made work that was a critique of the photograph and its perception, and after that it seemed lazy to fall into the convention of presenting standard prints in frames. This meant that the tautology of using the mirror as a metaphor for the photograph in the work, the doubling, the reflecting, bounced further on in the work. I also felt strongly about underlining the work as a material object as it moved from being an intangible image on screen. The polished surface of the mirror, the green tinge at the edges, although they were devised so that any reflections within them didn’t interact directly with the printed images, they did work to lend a solid glassy effect to the whole instead. There are several precedents of using mirrors within sculpture and installation, from Robert Morris’s minimalist cubes, to Robert Smithson’s Site and Non-Site earthworks, and of course more recently Anish Kapoor’s use of curved distorting mirrors. I bring mirrors into the gallery space to interact with the photography, to play with attraction and deflection whilst the viewer engages with the images. They have the ability to attract the eye and catch the light and I hope they make the work seem light and heavy at the same time. • Are you interested in the use of mirrors in other artworks? Yes, definitely. I'm exploring several other possibilities at the moment - other ways of interweaving photography and mirrors, both working with mirrors internally within the image-space and also using their physical forms in a more sculptural, installation sense. It would be good to build on the work with landscape in this series and work more (site) specifically, rural or urban, but I'm open to other subject matter in the long term: there's the whole 'world of photography' out there to be held up to the mirror...

1. Roland Barthes, ‘Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography’, (1981), publishers Hill and Wang.

Viewfinder Photography Gallery Linear House, Peyton Place, off Royal Hill, Greenwich, London SE10 8RS www.viewfinder.org.uk