Frontier

An ongoing research project engaged through photographic art practice

Images collected from high street photographic labs between 2000 and 2018. At the beginning of this period film dominated the domestic market, by the end of it, film was virtually redundant as a mass medium. What characterised this period overall was the hybrid nature of the technology used, combining analogue and digital processes in the production of domestic snapshots and passport images. Film became scanned and printed via lasers onto traditional light sensitive paper before advances in dry lab technology effectively brought an end to the era of light sensitive silver halide technology that has characterised the medium since its inception. This overlapping of technologies is represented through failures in the process and calibration images designed to minimize such anomalies. This work represents this unique period picturing a strange disappearing world where subjects struggle to be represented through an apparatus that is at once progressive, traditional, coercive, alchemic and ultimately magical.

The findings are made visible through the practice. The ideas proposed through this practice will become the basis for theoretical research which is currently in progress.