The Female Gaze

A Few Thoughts on Photography

Last Friday, I and a bunch of fair people opened our show Maelström at the WASPS Gallery. Here’s a little sneak-peak of my Few Thoughts on Photography with titles and a little explanation. It is exactly what the title indicates, but not to be taken too seriously nor seen as exhausting the topic.

Copying (Eggleston). Colour inkjet print and photocopy.
Colour photograph made black and white, with a hint of a mistake and questioning of windowmats and framing.

Documentary. Cyanotype.
Or perhaps trendy mail art. I posted this cyanotype to myself so it documented its travels from the post office to my flat, where I washed it in the bath tub. It picked up what I think are fingerprints, the chemicals probably reacting to the heat of the hand and of course acquired this wonderful gradient.

Narcissus Framed. Mirror and clip frame.
Sculpture lurks in the most surprising places. IKEA apparently being one of them.

Black and White. Colour inkjet print.
A colour photograph without colour. This is what home looks like.

Modified Rainbow. Epson Stylus 4800 nozzle check on office paper.

Enlarger. Magnifying glass.

Mindmap. Colour inkjet print.
The ideas for the work mapped out made into a classic glossy photograph.

Light Magenta. Hand coloured gelatin silver print.
I wanted to hand colour a black and white print, like those tacky old landscape photographs that often end up as postcards, making a black and white photograph colour. It never looks right somehow.

Self-portrait as Daguerrotype. Glass, silver leaf, positive.
I wanted to make a self-portrait of me as a Daguerrotype, or a type of person that would pose in a Daguerrotype

. But instead of making a real Daguerrotype, I faked one. There had to be one doctored image in the work and I wanted to make a point of faking an old process rather than Photoshopping something, which is what people generally associate with fakes. But in fact photographers have been faking it for quite some time.

Lesson 1: How to See in Black and White. Paper, gel, sealable plastic bag.
Black and white photography made easy with monochrome glasses!

Dust. Silver gelatin print.
A print solely consisting of photographers enemy no.1; Dust, collected in the artist’s studio. And who would have thought it would be so hard to print.

Flat / Blue. Jessops protective paper.
This comes on top of a stack of Jessops inkjet paper, it is the piece of paper you are not supposed to use and for some reason it comes in this beautiful blue. Having nothing on it draws attention to the paper itself, the flatness of it and corners.

Fingerprint. Ink on card.
Yes, a bit of word-play but also one of the great enemies of photographers, endlessly trying to avoid them on negatives, prints, glass, lenses and so forth.

Glasgow (18% Grey). Colour inkjet print.
I never use a grey-card in Glasgow.

Landscape. Braille on paper.
The blind wont know there’s no image, and the seeing won’t know what’s missing.

Portrait. Braille on paper.

Photogram. Pigment, sealable plastic bag.
Some see a little landscape, some see Icelandic ash, I just meant to make fun of the vocabulary of photography and look at the pigment apart from the paper.

Burnt Snow (Home). Colour inkjet print.
Here I was thinking firstly of the fragility of paper (and most aspects of the photographic medium), burning it in this case. Secondly pondering the power of representation of photographs, here doing the impossible, burning snow and water and also home.

Pinhole. Card.
Not camera, just pinhole. A simple representation of a hole, of nothing and the foundation of the photographic medium.

Multiple. Wall plan and index on office paper.
A plan indicating the titles shown above, both part of the work and explaining it. On the back of the plan is an index, referencing to both individual pieces within the work, the work as a whole, the photographic medium, theory and random other things that came to mind.