Double dark: a constructed composition from a darkroom haptic

© 2012 Danica ChappellThe thesis, including the paper and artworks, cogitates upon the research undertaken that explores contemporary photographic practice through questioning the conventions of the photograph in a contemporary culture of ‘image saturation’. The first chapter defines limitations harboured in the known photographic apparatus – the camera. Explicated is the camera’s function of placing the viewer in the monocular position of single point perspective of a frozen moment. That then leads to a discussion of the reception of images in a contemporary culture of ‘image saturation’. This problem petitions a testing and ultimate discarding of the camera-apparatus from the project. The darkroom and associated ‘production methods’ of analogue processes are considered as an ‘extended apparatus’ to conceive a solution. Drawing focus on the non-figurative photograph, chapter two positions the materially driven processes of a cameraless practice derived from cameraless action produced in the darkroom. This chapter asks, can a photograph be abstract? By examining the characteristics of ‘Concrete Photography’ and ‘Abstract Photography’, the research exposes ideas that support a conflation of both concrete and abstract on the one surface. Adapted from László Moholy-Nagy’s photogram the final chapter defines the ‘extended apparatus’ used in the project as three components. These are the ‘constructed composition’; the ‘traces between light and dark’; and the ‘darkroom haptic’. When merged these components become the ‘extended apparatus’ that produce a photographic object. In a series of materially driven haptic actions, conducted in the blind space of the darkroom, the research resolves as non-figurative ‘photographic constructions’ that aim to evade traditional representational conventions, associated with the saturation of the lens-based photograph in contemporary culture. The layered complex adapted process combines a painterly aesthetic, sculptural actions and photographic processes, ‘re-representing’ light, materials and action as a unique photographic object in contrast to the saturation of lens-based images