HAPPILY AFTER EVER
With the advent of digitisation and the passing of ‘peak camera’, my intention with “Happy After Ever” is to produce a series of photographs re-stating the lasting power of the photographic image. In a world where present quantity seems the enemy of historic quality, the work will ask if photography’s ubiquity has threatened its fixity as art, and whether its practice remains a valid form of visual expression. With the rise of the smart phone what constitutes a lasting image, and what effect has digital expression had on photography’s value in art making? Does the image sustain value beyond the experience of it’s capture?
This series continues my interpretative response to the work of the Dutch Masters, but enlists landscape elements to further my investigation of notions of permanence in photography’s digital realm. By placing the figure in inhospitable, timeless environments the work contemplates whether photography’s contemporary digital expression risks it’s legacy as lasting cultural artefact?
Within these photographs I’m interested in exploring how digital disruption has altered photographic processes forever. Whether a landscape backdrop or an over scaled still life, the purpose of the backdrop is to disrupt ways of seeing; to lend a surreality to the image.
