2. Suspended by Silver
(2015)
Photography is being interviewed and is reminiscing about his (definitely male) career. We see photographs as Photography sees them – as drawings. His thinking has its roots in descriptions of early photography, particularly Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature, in which photographs were referred to as (photogenic) drawings. This thinking becomes increasingly dissonant when applied to advances in photographic technique, which should lead to changes in tension between the images in Suspended by Silver, which are drawings, and the kind of images that the reader is expected to believe them to be.
In the text, Photography occupies recto pages and dense graphite drawings, which are sometimes hard to read accurately, and the interviewer occupies the verso pages and has the role of adding more concrete information to what Photography is saying. The diagrammatic voice of the interviewer is influenced by images found in photography manuals and offers clues to Photography’s identity, which is not made immediately available to the reader.
The story begins and ends with the first known photograph, ‘View from the window at le Gras’ by Niepce (the first version is a photograph of the photograph). After that the images run back in time whilst the words tell the story of Photography’s career from the beginning, so whilst Photography is describing his early life the images are current - drawings of Instagram pictures of meals and voyeuristic images taken by webcams. Whilst photography is describing its digital self, we are seeing drawings based on early experiments in photography which appear to be decaying/on fire. Although all of the images in Suspended by Silver are currently black and white, I would like the expanded version to start in colour and fade backwards to monochrome.
There is a recurring theme of dust, dirt and the granular. This is a reference to Barthes’ punctum (one example of which was dirt under Tristran Tzara’s fingernails), to James Elkins’s idea that photography is a granular medium and to the referencing of photography’s capacity to depict single grains of desert sand in order to prove its accuracy. The link between photography, death and dirt has been on my mind for a while. There is Barthes’ point that we are always moving away from photographs of ourselves towards death (I also visited a lecture at the RCA in which someone was arguing that Kafka’s death machine was a camera) and there is a relationship between photography and still life painting (stilled lives, photography as a frozen instant) in which the depiction of dirt and decay is a reminder of mortality. These ideas circle each other and overlap but never quite amount to anything concrete.
Different kinds of light are important (such as the light that comes from a radio star or a nuclear explosion), and the relationship between photographic developments (such as the rapotronic camera) and the nuclear tests that took place in the Nevada desert in the 1950s is a recurring theme. Inevitably, the nature of the instant depicted by a photograph is fluid and mobile and so the ‘instants’ represented by the frames in this story are also elastic in terms of the amount of narrative time they represent.
This project was an attempt to synthesise some of the ideas I was left with after I completed my PhD. It is incomplete and inperfect (the above text is taken for a proposal for an expanded version) and I may try to resurrect it at some point.
