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.
Clairvoyance
Nov 18, 2019 - Nicholas Hubicki
Photography and its manifold relationship to documentation has been abundantly recorded since its birth. What happens, however, when the site or object documented is yet to attain a broader socio-cultural signification than the simple recording of the site or object itself?
Both of these sites attained certain cultural currency, that is, both sites were circulated through various media outlets due to two separate events. The first event was a raid on one of the members of the 2016 Melbourne terrorist plot’s homes (the cell had planned attacks on major civic spaces for Christmas Day). The second event being a 2014 double murder within the home of a middle-class Melbourne suburb (a suburb I spent much of my childhood in, and a house that was well known to me).
In both cases, the images shown were shot several months before these sites were ‘documented’ and disseminated by the media. Each image, too, was shot in the process of working on other bodies of work, thus only later did they become part of Scene/Sign/Site: they became recontextualised by subsequent events. While my work is often research based, it is perhaps with these two images that I have come closest to the Freudian unheimlich.