This research project approaches the photograph as a space of encounter that unsettles the relations between word and image. The project is motivated by the sense that it is important to consider the photograph alongside notions of commonality at a time of increasing fragmentation and alienation in terms of what is communicable. It is also driven by description as a mode of enquiry. 

The early stages of the research explored practices of space and everyday life along side ideas about community and commonality. From this developed a desire to draw out the relationship between word and image through methods of description. This led to a practice of writing and drawing in the place of and in relation to the photograph, moving between writing as image and the construction of photographic sequences as a visual syntax.

I frame the process of research within a series of on-going conversations and experiments. These conversations have grown over time, embedding themselves within the process of thinking about and making photographs. I remember sitting on a park bench and considering the space of the look and the work Jean-Paul Sartre, which then conversed with a series of photographs and writings that took place whilst sitting on all of the benches in my local park. I remember a conversation with a friend about description, about the description of Charles Bovary’s Hat in the opening sequence of Madame Bovary [1] by Gustave Flaubert, that came to inform my descriptive method and thinking about the photograph as a kind of mute or stuttering face. I developed a dialogue with Walker Evan’s Labor Anonymous series through writing and photographic sequences. I made photographs of discarded piles of organic matter whilst reading Alain Robbe-Grillet and Francis Ponges and thinking about the possibility of constructing an image.

The voice seems to be the most appropriate space for me to formalise this work. Making a series of voice recordings has enabled me to explore the incommensurability of word and image and to approach problems surrounding a thinking of the face, and the face-to-face encounter through the photograph. As such my writing and photographs exist alongside an installation of voice recordings that describe the photographic image. Throughout the project I try to evoke a problem of pronouns, an uncomfortable sense of the relations between us all in looking and thinking about the space of the image and how it can be constituted and conveyed.