The Department of Photography has a fluid approach to image making. Whether still or moving, analogue or digital, the photographic image is here a visual form that aims to be thoughtful as much as playful; allegorical yet thoroughly visual.

In this year’s work, the very etymology of the photograph – an image made from light – is embedded: light captured into slivers and leaking out of the image, light forming narrative and theatrical spaces, light creating landscapes made in the studio. Architecture is present, in the form of concrete and its associations with modernism and containment, or as a contemporary trompe l’oeil, where real and optical space collide. Touch and proximity are evoked in the representation of the body and portraiture, just as distance and separation characterise the optical and incandescent appearance of ghost images, understood as images of images.

The Photography SHOW is accompanied by Picking Up/Bouncing Back, a publication of this year’s photographic practice with texts by philosophers Alexander Garcia Düttmann and Jean-Luc Nancy.