Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

When I’m working on a new project my place looks like a mixture between the office of a private detective and the room of a fanatic teenage fan. The walls are covered with images in various sizes, newspaper cuttings and written notes, grouped together in different arrangements. I guess I structure my thoughts this way, by spreading them out on the wall. With the work "Dear Clark," I decided to transport this organized chaos into the exhibition (you can find installation views here: feldbuschwiesner.de) Arranging your ideas by arranging images is not a new approach, though. Aby Warburg (b. 1866), a German art historian, worked on a picture atlas named "Mnemosyne". On wooden boards covered with black cloth he attached images of different sources, reproductions from books, and visual materials from newspapers, which Warburg arranged in a way that they illustrated one or several thematic areas. He combined reproductions of images from the Renaissance with newspaper clippings, visualizing his thoughts on the recurrence of ancient motifs through art history and modern times. A new opportunity to group and arrange images offered by search engines like Google is “Search by Image”: it orders images according to visual and aesthetic similarities. Faye Hobson’s work with the same title explores this new option in a visual surprising way: Seeking to engage with the seemingly infinite number of images available online the artist has utilised this technology to appropriate images similar to a source image from her everyday reality. A discourse that would never have been possible with analogue photography is established between diverse images whose commonalities lie not in their subject but in their aesthetic qualities as analysed by a search algorithm. This project seeks to question ownership and accessibility of imagery within the digital age. Beyond their referential quality, these dislocated images reinforce the importance of context in determining photographic meaning. By playing with this idea of context, new dynamics are created between already existing images. The original authorial voice is subjected with new relational meanings created by the artist. This work seeks to explore how the photographic image itself can be mediated; it’s meaning subjected and its information deconstructed. You can find more of her work here: fayehobson.co.uk/