Cooleman Plain Karst, Kosciuszko National Park (Ghost Cave 1)2018
Artist statement: This work examines the history of landscape photography and architectural modernism; specifically, the allegory of the cave and symbolism. This investigation into the natural and built environment offers a tangible encounter with the thoughts, practices and feelings of another time and place. By focusing on analogue photographic processes – often mixing and omitting key steps in the development of gelatin silver prints and photograms, attention is drawn to how one’s perception of place and the historical content inscribed within the image is susceptible to change over time. A key aspect of the work is what the image could be seen to ‘do’ as well as how it performs and what it can become over time. In this way, the photographic image is presented as an event in itself, not simply as witness to – and objective recorder of events. This conceptual encounter with history, memory and forgetting mirrors our relationship with life and the history of photography itself, and is presented as a distinctly unfixed and variable event.
Gelatin silver prints are black-and-white photographic prints that have been created using papers coated with an emulsion of gelatin and light-sensitive silver salts. After the papers are briefly exposed to light (usually through a negative), a chemical developer renders the latent image as reduced silver, which is then fixed and washed. This technique was first introduced in the 1870s and is still used today. Most twentieth-century black-and-white photographs are gelatin silver prints. They are known for being highly detailed and sharply defined prints with a distinguishable smooth, even image surface.
