Lustre, 2013

Lustre is a series of twenty photographs exploring the surface of a single sheet of processed chromogenic colour paper.
 
This project stems from the experience of seeing a photographic print rip hours before the opening of an exhibition. It reflects upon the value we assign to printed images, the way photographs are handled and preserved, as a memento and commodity. The material itself is mass produced until an image is recorded onto the emulsion; only when this sheet is developed does it become a meaningful object.
 
Lustre explores our engagement with the photograph as an object, creasing and bending the paper support until an irreversible mark appears, and the flat plane of paper becomes a sculpture. In the absence of an image, the traces left by handling are the only meaningful signs.
 
Re-photographed in large format, the paper is returned to its original two-dimensional form. Its emphatic blankness heightens the ambiguity of photographic space. The white surface, takes on an ethereal quality, the illusion of marks held in tension with the flatness of the image. The expanse of white blurs the distinction between the edges of the paper and the edges of the image, playing with our perception of illusion and reality.
 
Series of Twenty Giclée Prints, 91.44 x 121.92 cm