Imprint – photography and the impressionable image.
Art Gallery of NSW till 18 May 2016
Here’s yet again another wonderful photography exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW. Today I observed a consistent flow of people wandering through this exhibition – taking their time to take in the works. Photography definitely remains popular and has its dedicated audience.
There’s a wonderful selection of photographs on exhibition here – full marks to the curator, Judy Annear.
From the gallery web site:
The exhibition examines the photographic representation of surface imprints and cast objects. Life masks, fossils and sculptural casts memorialise their subjects. This is also the task of the photograph. By preserving a representative likeness, a photograph allows us to remember and recollect. Yet the association between photography and the sculptural cast is more complex. A photographic image is produced when light reflected off a physical form is inscribed on a photo-sensitive surface. As an imprint of light, a photograph is itself a cast object.
This exhibition addresses and extends this metaphoric association, investigating the exchange between an object and its echo – an exchange that also serves as a form of masking. Drawn from the Gallery’s collection, all of the photographs in the show feature representational forms that have been produced by the direct contact between subject and material – whether fabric, plaster or wax – and immortalise the trace impression.
Here’s a link to the works on exhibition – link here.
Highly recommended – worth the visit.
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a footnote to the visit above – it seems that visiting the gallery can be a photo opportunity to photograph your friend. The images below represent a small number of times these two wandered in front of works and set about taking each other’s photo. They did not take any time to look at the actual exhibition. You will also notice in the first photo that the person taking the photograph of her friend has actually leant against the framed work on the wall.
their interruptions were not confined to the photography gallery – I saw them often in other gallery spaces.
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Paul Costigan