Generally speaking
.... I’m interested in foundations or fundamentals or essence of photography, but those fundamentals of photography shift with each project I work on James Welling[1
[1] Attributed to James Welling, Lyle Rexer and James Welling, “How to Skin a Live Cat: A Conversation on Photography,” Lay Flat (2010), 19 (as referenced in Squires, Carol, curator for publication from exhibition “What is a Photograph”, International Center [sic] of Photography, New York, 2013). 19.
Historically, Mondrian’s work shows a gradual move from realistic depiction into pure abstraction and fits the Latin origin of the term abstract as a depiction that “involves drawing away from something” (the real) towards a personal, reflective state demanding feeling and emotional response from a viewer born out of mathematical and scientific form.
In direct contrast to Mondrian’s position, Swiss artist, designer and architect Max Bill (1908-1994) began working directly with non-representation from a perspective firmly based within abstraction and not a perspective requiring “drawing away from something else”. The term associated with this position is Concrete Art (Art Concret), an art explored through mathematics and the new physics of the early 20th century, and an art that informed the creation of a new science of form understood and experienced by the senses.[1] Translating this proposition into photography is difficult. German photographer and theorist, Gottfried Jäger (b.1937) defines concrete photography as something that does not depict external objects as it is already ‘a something ‘complete or concrete in its physical photographic form. It does not come out of the removal of the representational and is its own self and therefore the direct opposite of abstraction in the terms expressed by Mondrian. Jäger further expresses concrete photography as a photographic practice underpinned with notions of self-examination and self-reflection. It becomes an ideology that creates conditions where the photographic means becomes the object of photography and therefore the medium itself the object. It sacrifices the iconic and symbolic while utilising only the primal elements of light - and light sensitive materials in its production. Jäger discusses the photograph as not a representation or a reproduction of something but rather presented and produced as an object made from photographic material. They (these photographs) are independent from traditional form and structure and refer to nothing outside themselves and thus reject anything that is not bound up in the medium of photography. Concrete photography does not depict the visible or the non-visible. By removing traditional associations to external images, feelings, memories or ideas, the concrete photograph is free to be considered on its own terms and able to establish visibility itself.[2]
[1] Greg Neville, Blogspot, Accessed from https://greg-neville.com/2012/09/10/concrete-photography/ - last accessed 3/9/17.
[2] Gottfried Jäger, Concrete Photography, (Verlag: Kerber, 2005), 15-16.
Copyright: Circles of Light: An Investigation of the Photographic Medium and a Chance Encounter
Chris Byrnes 2017
These early scientists and researchers have illustrated through their work knowledge of the human body and the physical world. While this primitive methodology of making has not been considered within my own practice to date, I acknowledge that a flickering light of interest has been quietly burning into possibilities of constructing a ‘photograph made without light’. While researching Darget, I am simultaneously directed forward into a contemporary space towards the work of Australian artist, Sarah Mosca (b.1980). Mosca does not expose plates or paper on human skin in the external light in the same process as Darget. She does however, place film under her clothes and next to her own skin thus providing a simple connection back into the history of photography while extending through into a contemporary conceptual position. As Mosca does protect the film from light during the taping to her body and removal of same, she is making “a photograph without light.”[1] It isn’t an image made from light but from latent heat and bodily perspiration. There is space for further investigation with historical photography’s reinvention, including extending the general definition that a photograph must be made with and by light.
[1] General information gained from Sarah Mosca talking about her work at Sydney College of the Arts: Artist Talks, Online Video, accessed via YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdKqaEU_Rzo, last accessed 28/8/17 and Sarah Mosca interview with Try Hard Magazine Accessed at: http://tryhardmagazine.com/interview_sarah_mosca_kim_fasher (online website, last viewed 28/8/2017).
Copyright Reference: Circle of Light MFA C Byrnes
