The Gestural Nature of Photography

My work explores the ontology of photography, the questioning of what makes a photograph a photograph, by blurring the boundaries between different mediums and picking apart the notion that the main function of the photograph is to document reality faithfully. Rather than using photography to capture an external subject, I aim to use it in a self-reflexive manner, making the processes and the medium itself the subjects of the work. Each photograph is created in the colour darkroom with a hand painted transparency, which acts as a negative and allows me to combine the mark making capabilities of painting with photography. The action of painting brings the ‘artist’s hand’ into the photograph and therefore also allows for the gesture and the expressive nature of paint to come into play. These notions of physicality and materiality are key to my work, along with abstraction and non-representation. By shifting focus away from a recognisable subject, my work questions ideas of representation and forces the viewer to change the way they view photographs; to slow down their consumption of the image and force them to question what they're looking at.