Unknown photographer (Associated Press, USA), Portrait of actress Marilyn Miller, 1931
Surface Tension: Photography, Truth, Materiality Although long regarded as simply transparent to the things it depicts, photography is in fact a medium steeped in its own materiality. This exhibition features work by artists that reflects on, or creatively exploits, the peculiarities of photography’s various material substrates.
That work invites us to look through the photograph to its recording of a moment from the past even while drawing our eyes back to that photograph’s surface and the exigencies of its existence in the present. These are works that make us look at the photograph as much as through it and remind us that photographs are both objects and windows. In complicating photography’s transparency and its usual referential and temporal conventions, such photographs also cast doubt on the medium’s traditional truth claims. They highlight photography’s artifice. They make us question what we see and what we know. They make us ask what is true and what is not. They make us think.
With this self-reflexive thinking in mind, Surface Tension includes both historical and contemporary examples of photographs where artists have combined negatives, drawn, painted or scratched on their negatives, manipulated their emulsions in various ways, transmutated the photographic image from one medium into another, or simply set aside the camera to engineer a direct contact between the world and their photograph. In one way or another, they have all turned photography inside out. As critic Max Kozloff once wrote, ‘confronting such art, one is asked to judge, but cannot resolve, the conflict between the “transparency” of the photographic record and the way it has been undermined in such a fashion as to stress its object-like character’. This exhibition explores whether such an irresolution might allow these kinds of photograph to offer us different kinds of truths, including about the photographic medium itself.
This exhibtion is curated by Katy Barron, Geoffrey Batchen and Isabel Gregory.
Group exhibition
Surface tension
Kendrew Barn
St John’s College
St Giles,
Oxford
OX1 3JP
25 October–
16 November
Talks:
Thursday 30 October 5pm - 6pm
Rethinking the Photographic Document: Justine Varga in conversation with Isabel Gregory
Thursday 13 November
5pm - 6pm
Photography and/as Music: Thomas Metcalf in conversation with Geoffrey Batchen
