This thesis situates aspects of my recent practice by examining photography's apparatus inrelation to the idea of the unrepresentable.In art, awakening the present to the past or memorializing the dead evokes a dense web ofcultural practices, aesthetic conventions and social agreements. Photography is unique amongthem. The act of photography is one of apprehension, for it grasps what is given spatially andtemporally then isolates both space and time from a continuum. This rupture caused in spacetimeis one of photography's most evocative and least understood effects. Spatial immediacyand temporal anteriority, the here-now and the has-been are, in a photograph, presentedsimultaneously. I explore this rupture in relation to the dialectic between presence andabsence, and to certain subjects that exceed photography.My own works propose to give form to delicate and nuanced questions concerning invisiblesubjects or subjects that exceed representation. I explore how the photograph is implicated inits (self) presentation. How can the photographic reflect its own condition while simultaneouslyrepresenting subjects other than itself? I situate my work alongside early and contemporaryphotographic works, “zero-degree” painting and examples from conceptual photography andconsider these questions as a weaving together of the relations in my artwork: what is thephotographic? What exceeds the photographic as the unrepresentable?
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