Happy After Ever

With the advent of digitisation and the passing of ‘peak camera’, I’m interested in exploring the lasting power of the contemporary photographic image. In a world where present quantity seems the enemy of historic quality, the work will ask if photography’s ubiquity has threatened its fixity as art, and whether its practice remains a valid form of visual expression. When chiaroscuro is but one of myriad digital effects, when erasure is built into the host platform’s algorithm, does the image sustain value beyond the experience of its capture? Art, made and received, is always a present moment experience, but to endure, it must survive both its processes of manufacture and the period of its making. Today, whether or not a photographic image lasts at all is at the mercy of digital failure. During my recent trip to Iceland I was interested in exploring the concept of cultural erasure in environments of existential threat.