1987 (Vanished from this Image: 1929-1958) (NEGATIVE); Anxiety about the Real (2017), GCGCA(i)

Anxiety about the Real

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

20 Mar - 20 Jun 2017

Anxiety about the Real explores the changing nature of our understanding - or reaction to - photography in its now dominantly digital form, specifically in our grasp of how it relates to reality, reflecting back upon the history of photographic manipulation - of our manipulation of images, and their manipulation of us.

The use of censored images serve as emblematic instances of the ongoing process or ‘aferlife' of all cultural objects as they enter into different circumstances - historical relations - as each is fated to fall ‘out of joint’ with their own time, over the course of time. By mirroring aspects associated with analogue photography like inversion and double-exposure (the latter being central to creation of ’Spirit’ or ‘Ghost’ photographs), the subjects censored haunt their images.

Their questioning of either the presence or absence of the subjects in question in the images censored, at different moments in time, points beyond the refunctioning of discrete photographic genres (the previous cultural functions of analogue trickery), toward the structure of the image itself (whether it be within our field of vision or in our imagination), which establishes a relation between a certain absence, and the peculiar form of the presence of this absence.

Someone will be present in the gallery space to discuss photography and help dispel a popular misconception caused by the switch from analogue to digital photography; for the sensors employed still register direct light: photographs are still physically forced to correspond point by point to nature, thereby ensuring a relation to the real.

Notes (detail); Anxiety about the Real (2017), GCGCA(i)

1987 (Vanished from this Image: 1929-1958) (NEGATIVE); Anxiety about the Real (2017), GCGCA(i)

1937 (Vanished from this Image: 1939 and 1991) (POSITIVE); Anxiety about the Real (2017), GCGCA(i)

1937 (Vanished from this Image: 1939 - 1991) (NEGATIVE); Anxiety about the Real (2017), GCGCA(i)