WHEN : Until 12th August
WHERE : Queensland Centre of Photography
I photograph in fog in various unrelated locations. My work uses elements of fog and haze as portals to the transitory quality of one’s surroundings, and examines the insecurity of one’s experience in the landscape. In unclear air, objects lose their finiteness of appearance, and the surroundings occur less permanent or solid. Borders become obscured and the horizon hidden, removing the context within which one normally associates objects, and impelling an experience of boundlessness and uncertain perception. Fog like conditions create separation, and when no longer bound to their surroundings, things appear as they are. But they too can seem less ordinary, isolated within the landscape in which they normally exist.
Fog separates an object from its environment, and can also abstract the observer from the object. The presence of fog is an interruption causing the emergence of psychical distance, or a stepping back of the viewer from the situation, such that something very familiar can be as if seen for the first time. It corresponds to a contemporaneous occurrence of objective and subjective isolation, where fog separates objects from one another and psychologically from oneself. In this way, being in fog is like everything being in its own bubble.
In photographing matters in unclear air, I use no digital manipulation, a square format and a straight-on aspect. The presentation of the work employs the use of aluminium, perspex and metallic photographic paper, printed in large scale.
Image :Svetlana Bailey ‘12/08’ 2012 – Type C Print, 100 x 100 cm, ed/8 + 2AP.
Text : Centre of Photography, 2012
