“Think of it like peeling a polaroid apart.”
It speaks to a recognition of “the changed relationship of the photograph to the world,” curators Kiron Robinson and Izabela Pluta tell me about Built photography. “Instead of being a ‘reflection’ of the world, photographic images are now world builders. Literally, the world builds itself to match the photograph. This is the condition that the artists in this show are grappling with. What does this mean, to enact an inflation of the photograph’s two-dimensional plane – philosophically, culturally, and materially?”
Andrew Tetzlaff, Observations of a Falling Light, 2021–, locally sourced stone, prints on silk and cotton thread. Collection of the artist. Photograph: Michael Quinan. Courtesy the artist
This exhibition came out of the curators’ own practices, where conversations over modes of working led to looking at other practices “that approached photographic thinking and making in similar ways.” It flowed from this, to draw together works from sixteen artists, including newly commissioned ones. It’s an exhibition dynamic in its approach to photography as a physical construction. Where the artists are speaking to an intrinsic photographic condition of surface and flatness while simultaneously resisting it.
To demonstrate this dynamism for me, Robinson and Pluta point to Jess Curry’s work Soft Edges: Blue Mediations, 2021, which creates a series of layers drawn out of the material construction of a photograph. “Think of it like peeling a polaroid apart,” Robinson and Pluta say, reading Curry’s contribution while also speaking to what each of the artists in this exhibition are doing in some way – peeling photography. “The plastic outer layer, the chemical inner layers and the hard backing layer. Jess takes this template and constructs her work.” A work containing physical layers that, here, occupy a shop window-sized space in the gallery.
Jess Curry, Soft Edges: Blue Mediations (install detail), 2021, acrylic, gold/silver two way mirror adhesive, steel, aluminium, brass, 350 × 225cm. Courtesy the artist
“Layers that can be walked behind, etched upon, seen through.” And that “with each different way of engaging them, reveals different perspectives on the work.” For example, “when seen from afar the work flattens into one viewing plane. As it is approached the components expand and divide, and as one goes even closer” to view sections of the work, “it absorbs the viewer into itself,” to “therefore be seen by others as part of the work. It is a constant process of flattening and expanding all relative to how the viewer navigates the work.”
Among the interests of the artists on show is how traditional understandings of a photograph – read: its two-dimensional representative function – can be extended, and what happens when the ‘objectness’ of materials involved in the creation and display of the photograph is acknowledged. When asked how exactly this exhibition advances viewers towards an answer to ‘what happens when’ we acknowledge photography’s objectness, Robinson and Pluta explain that instead of answers necessarily, “we are trying to have a space where these questions can be explored.”
The curators have the correct mindset, in my view. Deconstructing photography has been a long and transdisciplinary project. Both the ostensibly ‘final’ (read: ever up for retouch) image and the processes, framings, materials and other conditions of construction used to attain that image. “In this current world where the photographic image is the universal language yet is also so divorced from the world in its creation, what does this mean for us all?”
When the built properties of photography are made visible, as they are in this exhibition, we get pulled into conversation with some of our most pressing concerns. Concerns such as how, in the curators’ words: “On Facebook now, AI-generated images are some of the most circulated, viewed and interacted with, so what does this mean when the world models itself on photographic images? What happens when the two-dimensional flat space is inflated to make our three-dimensional lived space?”
Dr Joseph Brennan is a Lambda Literary Award-nominated author based in Tropical North Queensland.
Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh)
8 June to 25 August 2024
Melbourne
