Ghosting

Photography is and has always been a game of shadows. The photograph an object made of shadows, light and time. The earliest images, thin chemical ghosts floating on a polished mirror and erasable by a thumb. Fragile and contingent, these photographs, needing the right angle for shadows and light to resolve into an image, were as much about how to see as being images.

For we had to be trained into seeing these elusive chemical ghosts. We needed to come to terms with the endurance of the life that was no longer there but continued in our sight. We needed to become accustomed to the persistent presence of these complicated shadows, to the rupture that opened up when the material world and time that we in lived in and through was shadowed on a plate.

We may have been accustomed to it in life, in stories, in memory but with photography we needed to become accustomed to this new and persistent haunting.

It is in this space, that which Martyn Jolly concisely calls “the unbridgeable fissure between reality and the uncanny copy of that reality” [i] where the photograph’s ghostliness inheres. Where presence and absence, past and present, material and resemblance vacillate eternally in irreconcilable contradiction. And it is in this space that is always already haunted and that opens itself endlessly up to haunting that these artists move and work. Their concerns and compulsions are rooted in these boundary zones and shadow territories where multiple narratives and possibilities jostle and contend, where demarcations are unclear, where past, future and present coexist.

Boundary riders of sorts, these artists move in and through the spaces of landscape, history, of self, embodiment, memory, and identity, of the unrecorded event, of trauma, and persistent absence. Not patrolling or enforcing but sensing, recording, acting in the world producing images that are not simply document nor end point but gatherings of presence, enactments of memory, ghostings, moving through place and time unsettling the world’s certainties.

 [2]

In engaging with significant sites as Blanch and Tylor do, in excavating memory as England does, in Taylor and Kneebone’s unsettling of colonial histories; as Kimber, Paauwe, Lane and Greenslade stage the shades and spectacle of identity, its composition and decomposition, these artists are undertaking a form of haunting themselves. They are ghosting, shadowing, moving through these spaces and states of indeterminacy and ambiguity trying on and out, all the as yet unenacted, unrealised potentials and possibilities of the world.

“the reason my molars are so broken, is I spend too much time ghosting with the likes of you and yours”[ii]

Here, to ghost is to double, to shadow, to move through a form, identity or place, to ghost is to enact, to play out that which has not been, is not, may never be. To ghost is to play out all the unrealised possibilities and potentialities of the world.

To ghost is to move in haunted spaces, to run with ghosts and to invite haunting in all its disruptive and productive potential.

Alice Blanch’s landscapes are the presentations of her journeys through and in the environment. Her view is neither the Romantic projection of landscape as self nor the scopic gaze. Taken on a box brownie with overlapping frames and shadowed horizon lines, these panoramas stretch out expanding time into the duration of experience. Of remote or uninhabited locations, they are suffused with presence invoking previous habitations and suggesting an immanence of presence. Rather than landscape, these are tracings of the embodied experience in the environment, of being and moving in landscape and of being open to its presences in and through time.

 [3]

The persistent force of the past as memory is painstakingly excavated in Odette England’s work. Impelled by homesickness, England enlisted her parents to revisit and walk the lost family farm with negatives of earlier images of the farm strapped to their shoe soles. Retrieving these scuffed and fragmented negatives, she photographed them with fissures and damage intact creating complicated palimpsests of place and memory redolent with absence and loss. Ghosting through her parent’s presence in a place personally significant, these enactments of yearning reassert memory as active presence through an intertwined past, future and present.

Within James Tylor’s daguerreotypes, the ghost is ever present, as daguerreotypes vacillate between negative and positive depending on the angle of view, holding absence and presence together in their delicate surfaces. The images seem unremarkable in themselves: a hut, a gully, a hill, a river mouth yet are imbued with a seeming significance beyond this ostensible subject. That these are sites of trauma and unquiet histories is radically reinserted into the present through the bullet marks pocking the plates and rupturing the image.