This thesis situates aspects of my recent practice by examining photography's apparatus in... Show moreThis thesis situates aspects of my recent practice by examining photography's apparatus in
relation to the idea of the unrepresentable.
In art, awakening the present to the past or memorializing the dead evokes a dense web of
cultural practices, aesthetic conventions and social agreements. Photography is unique among
them. The act of photography is one of apprehension, for it grasps what is given spatially and
temporally then isolates both space and time from a continuum. This rupture caused in spacetime
is one of photography's most evocative and least understood effects. Spatial immediacy
and temporal anteriority, the here-now and the has-been are, in a photograph, presented
simultaneously. I explore this rupture in relation to the dialectic between presence and
absence, and to certain subjects that exceed photography.
My own works propose to give form to delicate and nuanced questions concerning invisible
subjects or subjects that exceed representation. I explore how the photograph is implicated in
its (self) presentation. How can the photographic reflect its own condition while simultaneously
representing subjects other than itself? I situate my work alongside early and contemporary
photographic works, “zero-degree” painting and examples from conceptual photography and
consider these questions as a weaving together of the relations in my artwork: what is the
photographic? What exceeds the photographic as the unrepresentable? Personal, noncommercial use of this item is permitted. Show less
