Jacqueline Butler

Butler is Head of Media at MMU School of Art, and an interdisciplinary artist working across analogue and digital media, exploring loss, female inheritance, and landscape. Currently studying a PhD in Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art, her research weaves old with new technology, reflecting on the history of photographic print and considering future concepts of print media. www.art.mmu.ac.uk/profile/jbutler

Of Light and Algorithm

In 2014 Carol Squiers curated a group exhibition exploring the physical presence of photography in the digital age, titled What Is a Photograph? at the ICP, New York. In the exhibition introduction Squiers asserts: "We are in a moment—which may stretch on for years—in which the photograph shifts effortlessly between platforms and media"1. In this paper I will evaluate what a photograph can become in light of this "moment" of change and as a direct result of interdisciplinary practice.

Focussing on the material objecthood of photography, Geoffrey Batchen writes: "...the result of a volatile, unpredictable relationship of light and chemistry photography is something to be looked at, not through, and to be made not taken. This photography is not of something, it is something."2. Batchen’s reference is specific to analogue, this paper will take one step further, contemplating surface and materiality in a post-analogue era. Evaluating a body of arts practice Neither Here nor There, blending technologies and philosophies old and new, the work combines analogue with 3D digital photography. Neither Here nor There is an assemblage, crossing photographic darkroom and digital print processes with 3D interventions (handmade sculptures captured and manipulated through darkroom and software techniques).

These techno-hybrids result from the flaws and the failures of technology. In the series Little Phantoms the low resolution images appear painterly. These soft malleable digital glitches resulting from scan errors, suggesting hand painted watercolour studies rather than images generated through algorithms. This leads to thoughts on hybridity and new forms of photo-painting and photo-drawing. By reflecting the cross-over between photographic and painterly visual language and embracing an element of nature (light) to paint, draw and capture a representation of an experience of the natural world we live in, “techno-hybrid” imagery is produced.

Carol Squiers, ed. What Is A Photograph? (Munich: Prestel,2014)
Ibid