In one of photography’s earlier iterations, its innovators implored their audiences to examine photographs with a magnifying lens, inviting people to see the seemingly infinite detail recreated in a photograph’s precise impression of the world; lettering on a distant building or billboard, the razor-sharp edges of the leaves of a tree; an otherwise-unseen bird resting on a rooftop in a view of the city. Some layer of the world that had previously passed people by was made visible, rendered in its minutest details, compressed within the image. The magnifying lens offered a way back into the world that waited in the photograph, ready to be opened up, expanded, experienced.

Installation Views (6 images)

At the centre of this story of photography was a conflict about how it was defined, and what it was for. Did photography make images, or take images? Did it offer a view of the world anew, or did it simply capture the world as it was? Something got lost in this argument, something that perhaps defined photography as much as its propensity for detail or its relationship to reality; that photographic images require processes of formation and recovery. Whether suspended in the chemistry of an emulsion, or in the electrical charges of light sensors, photographs emerge from a series of interventions that form the visible image. Photographs are records of their own development and exposure, of their transformation from potential to visible image, and of their translation between different kinds of material and media. One of the promises of photography is a certain kind of immediacy between the photograph, its subject, and the viewer, but by the same turn, the traces of its making can seem to disappear beneath its extraordinary fidelity.

Selected Works (6 images)

Multiplying in the pages of magazines, newspapers, and websites, photographs appeared exponentially reproducible, yet infinitely reducible—they could be resized, retouched, their resolution lowered, their meaning restrained, extraneous details covered or erased. Many of these interventions indicating the physical or desired limits of the image were not intended to be seen. Considered unruly for the purpose of illustration, there was potentially too much detail in photographs; they contained unintended information, they didn’t distinguish well between the important and incidental elements of a scene. This was thought to be distracting to viewers; there was too much to see, to marvel at, to lose one’s way within. The bird on the rooftop had become a nuisance, instead of a wonder.

Yet photographs that have been formed and manipulated for a particular purpose can also be decommissioned. What does a photograph show after it falls out of use? What is a photograph of when the mark of its production, or its obsolescence, becomes the detail that draws our attention? Maybe there is even more to see when the congruity of an image begins to break down. The photograph becomes an invitation into the depth of its own detail, even in the fractures and limits of what is visible. Now, the photograph might disclose any layer of its own making or deterioration, rendering the underlying image unearthed in relentless detail, or left as merely the impression of an impression.

— Text by Alice Mercier