prism #17 is here!

prism #17 is here featuring 9 photographers: Antoine Bruy, Michael J Keane, Dominic Hawgood, Nikolas Ventourakis, Marianne Bjornmyr, Anna Kieblesz, Fabrizio Albertini, India Lawton, Edyta Dufaj and an article on the Photo Album of Ireland by Darren Campion.

Erin O’Keefe: Surface and Depth

Erin O’Keefe: Surface and Depth

by Darren Campion

Given that we are surrounded by pictures and make constant use of them, it might seem inevitable that we should understand how they work, how the space within them operates to produce a certain kind of meaning – the cultural and practical saturation of images that we experience should ideally result in an equally pervasive measure of fluency when it comes to visual media, especially with regard to “reading” photographs, which obviously make up the vast majority of images that we both consume and produce. There are any number of reasons why this is actually not the case, of course, most of them related to the general qualities of photography as a medium and our assumptions about it.

The Flatness #1 / Erin O'Keefe

Apart from its self-consciously aesthetic uses, photography also has a range of other applications where the conditions of the medium tend to disappear, so when it comes to reading those images we see through the photograph itself in the belief that we are actually dealing (more or less directly) with its subject. In certain contexts this does make sense, but at the same time we are always confronting a subject that is seen photographically, that is to say, a picture specifically and not whatever reality that might have preceded it. In her work Erin O’Keefe is explicitly concerned with exploring the mechanics of photographic space, its material as well as conceptual terms, at a time when such questions are more pressing than ever. Hers is most obviously a studio-based practice, taking the still life tradition into a newly fragmented – one might almost say post-digital – direction.