Initial experements
The project is conceptually driven by a thought I had for a while which was then reinforced recently by the essay 'Myth today' by Philosopher Roland Barthes & the photographic series 'jpegs' by Thomas Ruff.
The subject in front of me is the reality in its most absolute form. When I open my camera shutter the light hits the negative which has predetermined how much light will be recorded in its emulsion. Then when the negative is scanned, the amount of 'reality' that can be captured is limited by how much data the scanner can process & how much Random Access Memory the computer contains. Then when the scanned image is transferred to a printer it is further compressed and so by the time the final printed image is in your hands back, in reality, is the photographic image reality at all after the number of changes it's been pushed through?
Current experiments on old negatives have proved that my plan is possible but on the journey, I will be faced with technical challenges centred around how I can appropriate the images enough to marry the concept to the image but not appropriate enough that the image is a totally abstract, pixelated mess.
Thomas Ruff has used digital appropriation to challenge the photographic images’ ability to represent reality. Paying attention to his series 'jpeg' which was on display at the Whitechapel gallery.
‘jpeg ny01’ is a large-scale, pixelated C-print of the New York city skyline. The Empire State building in the foreground dominates the left third of the image. The World Trade Center is in the background over to the right third of the image while smoke from the top of the building is blowing towards the Empire State building.
Thomas Ruff’s large-scale series visually represents Roland Barthes theories on semiotics & representing reality...
In 1957, Roland Barthes published his book ‘Mythologies’ where he wrote several essays based around semiotics and “an ideological critique bearing on the language of so-called mass-culture” (Barthes, 2009, p. xvii). In his essay ‘Myth today’ he talks about how no form of communication (writing, photography, painting etc…) can truly represent reality:
“A tree is a tree. Yes, of course. But a tree as expressed by Minou Drouet is no longer quite a tree, it is a tree which is decorated, adapted to a certain type of consumption, laden with literary self-indulgence, revolt, images, in short with a type of social usage which is added to pure matter.” (Barthes, 2009, p. 132).
This means that was is in front of us in the real-world is in fact, real. But once appropriated into a different medium, it is immediately taken out of its original frame and fragmented into a distorted version of the original.