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.

href="https://dergreif-online.de/www/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/AlexandraLethbridge02.jpg"> For my blog posts, I thought I’d do a series explaining my interests in photography and make a structure by which to discuss my practice and the ideas behind it. My work plays between traditional and more experimental methods of image making so for this post I thought I’d discuss some of the theories that have inspired it. My premise for understanding photography is to consider it as a portal. Portals can be thought of as a gateway or link to another place. Science Fiction has long been using portals; or wormholes as locations to travel though time and space without having to travel geographically to get to the destination. The idea of entering a portal is much like entering a photograph and it reminds me of photography’s ability to transcend the photographic print. I started to think about what it was the portal was pointing to. Within my own work, what in particular was I looking for? What place was I linking to? My research led me to ideas of Utopia. Thomas More coined the term in 1516 and it is defined as an ideal and perfect state. For the purposes of this post, I am using the idea of Utopia as a representational structure and choosing not to focus on the wider political and social connotations. Frederic Jameson in his book Archeologies of the Future, talks about a ‘Utopian Impulse’, which is the need to search for Utopian aspects within our everyday. The definition of Utopian can change from person to person and relates to exactly what they are looking for. The term once translated literally means ‘no land’. I’m interested in this idea as it sums up quite nicely, my own working relationship to photography and the things I look for when making work. This idea of a space between reality and representation begins to explain the kind of things I look for.

To try to clarify what I mean when I talk about this space between, I’ll share a fable by Jorge Luis Borges in his On Exactitude of Science. The fable is about a king who wanted to create a map of his empire. Maps were commissioned in all sizes, gradually getting larger and larger, until they created a map that was point for point the same size as the territory. The map became completely pointless and served no purpose.

The aspect of this story that stuck with me was the notion that an accurate copy of the ‘thing’ itself is completely useless. It’s in the differences between the map and the territory that it becomes useful, only gaining its power from selection and careful separation of reality and representation.

It’s this separation and the room for interpretation that then exists that I mean when speaking about the space between. This excerpt from an online article from the New Yorker really sums it up.

A map that is too exact becomes the thing it maps, endangering both Casey N. Cep, Allure of the Map, New Yorker Magazine, 2014

In the process of making work, generally I look to show something different and perhaps more interpretative than what I see. Photography offers me the choice to make something other than a copy. My interest has developed around the idea of photography as a method to see what we cannot see. Using the camera to reveal the world rather than document it. So in considering how photography might work specifically for my needs, I needed to work out what it is about the construction of a Utopia that is so appealing. In order for me to make sense of my work I needed to examine what I was looking for. Ernst Bloch in his book Principles of Hope talks about why we create ideas of Utopia. He states that we create Utopia because of the difference between our knowledge and our experience. By this theory the realization of Utopia exists in the gap between reality and our imagination. Another way of thinking about this might be, you may have heard of a country but never travelled there. So you may have built an idea of what this country looks like and what you might expect from it and that idea may be completely different to the country in which you live or have ever experienced. Frederic Jameson in his writings, says that if ideas of Utopia are born from our imagination then they are also limited by it. So to go back to my example, your ideas about this country, while they may seem more exotic than your current surroundings, the country itself may in fact be more elaborate than you could ever imagine, it being so far removed from your own experiences, that you have no point of reference to even contemplate what that might be like. It is in these exact limitations of what we know and therefore what we can imagine that leaves room for work that uses interventions within photography to represent Utopian ideas.