Many years ago when visiting Tate Modern, I saw two photographs by Iwao Yamawaki and Horacio Coppola. They were quite simple, but quite clearly modernist still lifes. They were results of an exercise they were given as students of the Baushaus, to photograph string and eggs on wooden tabletops. I was really taken by these aesthetic training exercises, that such a simple direction or instruction could produce a wealth of possibilities that could exploit and make use of both photography’s ability to render the surface of things and the skills of the photographer to manipulate this.
Within my practice a number of my works have over the past few years made use of and exploited how traditional light-sensitive photographic processes can work together with newer digital techniques. This wasn’t a planned trajectory but it has become like a red thread between a number of works since the work Elite, which I made between 2014 and 2015. In a later post I’ll introduce some of the thinking behind these works and map out how the relate to the work I am going to develop with help from the a-n Professional Development Grant I have been awarded..
Recently I became aware of a silver geltin black and white paper that is not designed for the darkroom but instead for digital exposure. I became interested in how I could maybe use this paper to bring together digital photographic techniques with analogue ones. Although digital has been much of a replacement to analogue, I still see them as different things—they do similar things in different ways. I was interested to see what could happen if the same paper was exposed to both sources to create a hybrid of sorts, what could opportunities could this combination open up?
With the professional bursary that I have been awarded I will attempt to work with this digital silver gelatin paper using the simple Bauhaus aesthetic exercise to steer my work to create a work that both looks at the legacy of training exercise in photography but also in the spirit of the Bauhaus, question the uses of photography.
