The paper will consider the role of photography in the representation of the North. Examining work that was made in the North By Professor Thomas Joshua Cooper and Sophus Stromholt, the paper will consider the role of photography as a representational vehicle in constructing and imaging threshold places. From the Ultima Thule to the Expeditions, photographs have been brought back as evidence, aide memoirs, and spaces that allow the imaginative to confront the actual. The physical space of the North is both a contested territory, as with every image that is brought back we find ourselves more at a distance to our imagination and more at proximity to a reality that moves from the Pictorial Sublime to the Pictorially impossible. Through a discussion of a practitioner's approach to the North as pictorial space, I will be discussing the multiple failures of the photographic medium to convey both representation and meaning in relationship to artistic practices that have moved from the representative to the abstract.
As a counter argument to the representational (and the potentially exploitative) I am proposing a different way of bringing back the Notion of the North. A series of new work is made in response to both Cooper’s photographs and Sromholt’s failed attempts of making photographs of the Aurora Borealis. This series of works consider the photographic event in an expanded sense, and resist the representational in the photographic. Can we bring back the idea of the North without the image? How is the imaginative expanded through the expansion of the pictorial space? What exists between the representational and the abstract in a medium that has been defined by the accuracy of representation? The paper proposes a new framework both in theory and practice of considering space (both pictorial and imaginative) from the charged position of the lens.