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May 16, 2013
The people behind the Ballarat International Foto Biennale have just produced One Thousand Words [about Photography], which is a journal of critical essays and reviews on photography. It is good to see.
In Issue One Judith Crispin in her essay, A Reflection on Photography, which originally appeared in the 2011 Ballarat International Foto Biennale Core Program Catalogue, questions photography's historical identification with art that reflects or represents reality. She concludes thus:
If we accept the idea that nature is unknowable photography can no longer be evaluated according to the principles of mimesis and must therefore be evaluated by the same criteria as other fine arts.
We do accept that photographic representation is commonly viewed as partial and fragmented and the difficulty of an indexical photographic image to represent the traumatic event; or to represent the radical untimeliness by which the spectres of history disassemble the order of past, present, and future.
Hence we have the idea of the uncanny as the return of the repressed; something that is secret and hidden but has come to light. Once constructed as an otherness to there "here and now" the past returns as a fragment of alterity, often in the form of the disused and obsolete object, the after image of a past trauma, a sensation of deja vu or a ghostly persistence.
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