FICTION-NON-FICTION
NELLIE CASTAN GALLERY (VIC) 2008
The works in the Fiction-non-fiction series are photographic images produced without a camera. By moulding and casting book spines in clear resin, transparent copies are produced. These are then placed on photographic paper and exposed to coloured light to create ‘photograms’. The final images are not simple photographs but record a process - a chain of transformations and inversions - that creates the trace of an object many steps removed from its origin. These analogue photographic procedures result in an image that belies a simple conception of photography as a direct, indexical reference, and play with some of the procedures and assumptions central to photographic practice.
Using books as a central motif, the images reference the largely redundant medium of cloth or leather-bound embossed books, and play with a range of associations common to books and photography – both are visual mediums created by mechanical print processes and both are repositories of personal and collective memory. Like photography itself, the working process transforms the substance of the original referent into something other - a ghostly, absent shadow of itself.