the staged and constructed image (2016-19)
In 2013, I curated an exhibition for the Berardo Museum in Lisbon on the uses of the archive (and in particular, the photographic archive) in the process of making art. The works were all selected from the museum’s collection, and incorporated varied uses of photography, ranging from simpler point and shoot methods, to elaborately staged and performed tableaux, to works that were montaged and manipulated, whether in the darkroom or digitially.
And of course, there are works in which all these types of practice are conflated. My earlier interest in photography had veered towards the more traditional view of photography as a technology that enabled the stopping and crystallising of time: a moment thus suspended and frozen was always to be a link to a lost past. I leant on a huge tradition of memorial photography, photography as a tool in memory practice. After all, this is the way that technology is most broadly used: to record a moment. However, with the work on Between Memory and Archive, I began to turn my attention to photographic practices that were less based on the techniques of capture, and more linked to construction and production, montage, the use of readymade materials: to fiction, in other words. Out of this research came two interlinked essays on the work of Vivan Sundaram, one in Portuguese, the other in English. And out of these essays grew the work for a book, published in 2019 by Tulika Press in Delhi and Columbia University Press in New York, Vivan Sundaram is not a Photographer: The Photographic Work of Vivan Sundaram.
In the course of research for the book on Sundaram, I gave a talk at the Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi on 8 November, 2016, titled The Staged and Constructed Image. The talk dealt with the paradigm shift from analogue to digital photography. This shift has entailed a vexation of the truth effect – the notion that a photograph captures a fragment of the real, and hence of photography as the art of memory. These questions also underpin my projects Verso and Dear Fusia.
