In Photography, Encore (2014), David Campany asks whether “subject matter might be part of the photographic apparatus.” Drawing on Baudrillard’s claim that “the magic of photography is that it is the object which does all the work,” this presentation explores photographic objecthood across pre- and post-pandemic, and post-AI conditions. It considers photographs as complex, performative convergences of apparatus, material and subject, extending Campany’s provocation to include the viewer as part of the apparatus through which images are encountered.
Two bodies of my work frame the discussion: Rezension – Skulptur, Objekt, Apparat (Memmingen Kunsthalle, 2019) and Event Horizons (2022–ongoing). The former engages with Gothic limewood sculptures photographed using large, multi-lensed camera-sculptures, each designed to scrutinise a single sculpture from multiple angles. Complicating ideas of reproducibility and authorship, and positioning the camera itself as sculpture, the resulting installation of cameras, negative photographs and religious figures formed a spatial choreography that invited the viewer to inhabit the relational field between image and object.
Event Horizons, conceived during COVID-19 lockdowns, extends this inquiry through AI-generated gaming landscapes photographed with a large-format 10x8 camera, pointed at a flat, 4K screen. The negatives were processed using home-brewed chemistry made from household and garden materials, where nature becomes collaborator rather than extractive source, its residues and imperfections retained as indexes of the hands-on process.
Engaging with James Elkins’s What Photography Is and new materialist thought, the presentation resists resolution, foregrounding photography as an entangled and complex assemblage of human, non-human and material processes.
