borders, 2021->
Baltz: “The edge. Quite literally, the major issue is the question of where to place the edge; what to include or exclude. A photograph is a five-sided flat object. In its construction those sides must be considered and referred to.”
Interviewer: “The fifth side?”
Baltz: “The frontal plane. The surface of the print acts as a reference point for the space that the image occupies. The plausibility of that fictive space rests entirely upon the concern shown for the print surface. [1]
What’s really interesting are these polaroids that Julia made. Here, Frederique is perfectly framed, and I am only half in the picture, less than half. Here, is a beautiful framing job of Frederique looking very dapper, I’m not visible at all. And here is Mark, nicely framed, a little bit off centre, and again the woman, Anna in this case, is cut out, she barely manages to get her hands into the picture. It’s almost as if Julia wouldn’t see women in her view finder. Dennis and Robert couldn’t be more beautifully framed they have plenty of space all around them, even the curtains look good here. Whereas Joan, only seems to have her entire body in this photograph because Dennis is on one side of her, and Joe is on the other side of her, and of course, Julia had to get both of these men, so, Joan wins by default. [2]
The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life. [3]
‘borders’ is a body of work that focuses more closely on themes that have been present in previous projects, such as intimacy, communication, connection with something outside of ourselves and beyond, and often a comment on the absence of these things, as well as, identity, place, female agency through art production, and the concern for authorship.
I use materials such as photography, video, audio field recordings, text, and voice, and consider this body of work to be speculative, in the way it sits in-between the binaries often used in the discourse around documentary practice. I use both analogue and digital photographic captures, and add digital features to an analogue image, or disrupt a sequence of images with a digital interjection, in an attempt to exercise agency in the creation of metafictions. I often use landscape as a stage to perform and/or appropriate narratives that exist within a place. Therefore, it is not only digital embellishments that hold a fictive weight, but I will “make” field recordings or “document” a built structure, and offer supporting materials, such as sound or video to provide “evidence” of my building/making within a place, but these activities are layers of events that may or may not be what they seem, but the questions around a speculative document/fiction underpin the work.
1. Forbes, Duncan. An Interview with Lewis Baltz (London: MACK, 2020), p.1.
2. Transcribed from the film The State of Things (1982), Directed by Wim Wenders.
3. Berger, John. ‘Field’ in Writing the Field Recording: Sound, Word, Environment, ed. Stephen Benson and Will Montgomery (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), p. 35.