The memory of the photograph!
The memory of the photograph* draws from film negatives, slide/transparencies and digital ‘files’ to look at how a photograph reflects its contexts of production – aesthetically and technologically – while memorialising events, places and people in unique ways. My images reflect fifty years of photographic memory as it is realised ‘in’ particular photos. They highlight the ubiquity of photographic memorialisation in genres where this is usually overlooked (such as landscapes, ‘postcards’). Here, the inevitable nostalgia of the photo is highlighted. Incidentally, my images ask how digital reproduction facilitates, perhaps constitutes, memory. Does it also change how we value the pasts we have photographed?
For the photographer, the ‘memory’ of the photographs exhibited also refers to the influences that each betrays – the technology and the aesthetics fashionable when they were made (modernist, romanticist). So each asks to be seen in terms of its genre while asserting its particularity. I hope my references to famous photographers’ and painters’ work draws attention to the ways in which we are always making photographs in the traditions with which we have become familiar, but also that each photo, while remembering these traditions and genres, is itself unique.
My images come from various sources – celluloid film, ‘slides’ – some from the proverbial shoe-box under the bed – and recent digital files. I have reproduced each as a digital print.
Philip Bell
The Corner Gallery Stanmore is a supporter of ‘Head-On’ Sydney, 2017. This exhibition is part of the Head-On photo festival.