Tenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Andrea Fisher’s work was preoccupied with how bodies, memories and loss were written into photographs. In her final work The Classification of White (1997), the images of the white sheets allude to both crumpled bed linen and winding sheets – places where our bodies encounter loss and alterity (sleep and sleeplessness, exhaustion, desire, birth and death). The collection of practically abstract images appears to mimic film stills and allude to stories whilst simultaneously withholding the satisfactions we often associate with narrative (such as resolution or temporal progress). One of the challenges of looking at Fisher’s work comes from the way the installations invite attentive interpretation (often her work would have a laboratory – even mortuary-esque – feel to it, encouraging a meditative absorption with the images and objects) and, simultaneously, withhold clarification: that the story you detected in the work was, in some way, untellable. This paper argues that the technologies of image making in Fisher’s work create an asymbolic visual language. Asymbolia has often been taken to be one of the defining of the non-human. Fisher’s work takes us to the border of what is communicable: the memories and meanings are encrypted, almost untranslatable, and we lack the password(s) that would allow us access. Could this barely legible (almost non-human) language be a form of post-humanist visual narrative? In the moment of crisis – when coherent, meaningful, directed language fails - could Fisher’s asymbolic language actually give us a form for ‘speaking’ about those things that we cannot, ordinarily, say?