Eleventh International Conference on The Image

Abstract

How does analogue film materially interact with elements of environmental phenomena and can such inscriptions, entanglements, and accidents produce new qualities of photography itself? To answer this question, this presentation necessarily considers and puts to the test a materialist form of photographic production. The photographs document various lakes and waterways from all across Australia. Once developed, the film was returned to the discreet geographic location and submerged in the water itself for durations of up to two months. The resulting ‘materialist photographs’ testify as indexical links to a reality that is doubly inflected as the landscape is registered on both a visual and physical level. Karen Barad’s concept of ‘intra-action’ is employed to investigate the complex exchange between the indexical, pictorial and agential entanglements as they relate to my photographic work. Photography has undergone a period of intense dematerialization over the last 150 years, and despite the increased demand for digital perfection, the use of film, as a material used for photographic capture, remains an important and viable medium through its unique indexical, auratic and physical presence. As digital continually threatens to engulf film and commerce through its relative ease of capture, dissemination and what Mary Ann Doane has described as a persistent ‘dream of immateriality’ (2007), it is important to investigate the medium in relation to the past and present. This paper considers contemporary materialist photography, at least in part, in relation the way in which technological images engulf our environment as we move swiftly through the digital age.