EXPOSING THE IMAGE
Between analogue and digital technologies
Text by Iga Koncka
A dialogue with artist Johanna Warwick
Photography cannot escape representation. A photograph is a visual record of something that happened. When looking at a photograph we tend to forget that we are looking at a flat surface and jump straight to the content. In this context, in her essay “The Image-World” (1977), Susan Sontag elaborates on the mechanical nature of photography, arguing that the making of an image does not have to depend on the photographer. Instead, the photographer guides the image-making process but the process itself is optical-chemical or electronic. Sontag touches upon the automatic and machinery functions of photography and how they are able to present a detailed surface of an image. According to her, some pictures can restore the relationship between partial identity of image and object (158).
Johanna Warwick, #2132x40", 2015.
Artist Johanna Warwick explores the photographic medium, between analogue and digital technologies, aiming to extract new information from pre-existing imagery. In her project “Monuments to Strangers” (2013-16) she works with archival images and different photographic technologies to delve into the ‘stories of the photographs’ and explore the voices hidden in historical images. In this project, the process of making a photograph is both electronic and optical-chemical. She uses a 4x5 camera to shoot photographs from newspapers originally published between the 1880s and 1960s through what are now considered outdated photomechanical processes. Through multiple exposures of 4x5 negatives to light and digital scanning and printing the final object, thus movin between the digital and analogue versions of the medium.
Johanna Warwick, Unidentified #2, 2013.
By re-photographing images of people back in the 19th and 20th centuries, Warwick draws attention to the position of women in our world, which is reflected in the disproportionately small number of images of women. In the exhibition of “Monuments to Strangers” (VisCom Gallery, 2016), she groups the photographs by sex, race and age of the people depicted, but inverting such societal classifications by printing the images of women in a larger size than those of men. Warwick’s body of work creates narratives through the appropriation of negatives where previously unknown women become the central point of attention and contributes to a deeper reflection on the historical oppression of women in society.
[Left] Johanna Warwick, Printed Woman #4, 2016.
[Right] Johanna Warwick, Printed Woman #1, 2016.
“Monuments to Strangers” deals with the notions of information and storytelling while recontextualising images through modern technology. By merging digital and analogue processes, Warwick makes us think about the nature of representation through distorted and overexposed images, thus revealing the limits of the photographic medium.
Johanna Warwick, Unidentified #29, 2016.
ON THE ARCHIVE...
I use archives as a starting point and this has manifested in different ways. Archives for me are useful both conceptually and practically. I photograph both objects from archives, but also make photographs to create new archives. With Monuments to Strangers the archive was very much the beginning, where I found the objects (historical printing blocks), that then became the physical material for investigating who is archived in the history of the United States (predominantly white males, women and people of colour being left out). In finishing this project, I began working on The Yellow Book: Interstate Legacy where I certainly interact with an archive in a different way. In this work, I use the historical object of the The Yellow Book from 1955 which outlines the placement of interstates through cities as the examination point. I don’t have access to the actual object, but am photographing each of the 104 cities included in it, creating my own archive of images that show the outcomes of the interstate in these places 67 years later.
ON THE LAST 10 YEARS...
I started working on Monuments to Strangers over 10 years ago, and I think the biggest transformation for me has been a movement from working in a studio, to going out and photographing the world. I love this project, but definitely found that I really missed responding to the world when I made that work. It’s a different practice – being in a space constructing everything that goes within the frame, versus moving through the world and framing from what you find. I think working both ways feeds different parts of me – but the thread through all these years is still a reflection on historical archives and what they tell us about the world.
ON DISCOVERIES IN THE ARCHIVE...
This certainly happened with my new work, The Yellow Book: Interstate Legacy. I had been photographing the neighbourhood I live in, Old South Baton Rouge, for a few years examining how the interstate decimated this thriving black community in the 1950s. In my research, I began to realise this happened to black neighbourhoods all across the United States. It was then that I discovered The Yellow Book, formally called The General Location of National System of Interstate Highways. It was the planning document, nicknamed for its yellow cover. This is the object that mapped where each interstate would be placed – and is the document I am using to photograph all 104 cities included. An overwhelming amount of these was built through black communities.
About Johanna Warwick
REFERENCES
Sontag, S. (1977) On Photography. London: Penguin Books.
