Gradients, 2022

What is a photograph? The oldest known surviving photograph is “View from the Window at Le Gras”, made by Nicéphore Niépce between 1826-1827 in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France; depicting the countryside from his estate ‘Le Gras’. Photography began as a means of capturing the “real” through its seemingly accurate reproduction of reality, e.i portraits, landscapes and still life. The question of “What is a photograph?” has been a subject of intense debate amongst the photography community throughout the medium’s existence. Photographers such as Edward Weston, Lewis Baltz, Stephen Shore, Bill Brandt, Hiroshi Sugimoto and countless others have attempted to push the visual boundaries of what photography is, and can be, in contrast to the prevailing tradition of photography being a process of objective truth, which in my opinion, it is not. This visuality of these works was inspired by my experience of seeing Mark Rothko’s red ‘Monochromes’ in the Tate Modern in 2012, which continued to affect me in a deeply emotional way, a decade after seeing them whilst the meaning behind the works came in the aftermath of a period of serious illness and reflect my feelings of tragedy, ecstasy, existential crisis, sorrow; mirroring Rothko’s own artistic interpretation of his own work. In discussions of photographies status as a form of art, the distinction is often made that photography is mechanical through it’s mechanical instrument (the camera), which fundamentally ignores the fact that behind the camera is a person who presses the shutter, who has created the situation between subject and person; between perception and memory, and like a painter, one selects, and the result is judged, by oneself as well as by others, by the quality of thought and feeling revealed in the final image.