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| Snap
Happy Jacqueline McDonald Stripp Gallery August 20 - September 29, 1997 Melbourne |
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| "The
enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more
precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it
reveals entirely new structural formations of the
subject." Walter Benjamin. |
One the most
immediate impressions one got visiting this show was that
of movement. The images in this show appear to be
narrating something. Jacqueline MacDonald has lined up in
chronological sequence a series of photographic images of
her own mouth 'smiling for the camera' (from two to
thirty three years) and her own eyes 'looking at the
camera' (from six months to thirty three years). The
sequence of mouths occupies one wall. The eyes have been
photographed separately, left and right, and occupy two
converging walls. The images cohere as a collection. Not only is a uniform theme immediately apparent, but the purity of the technique employed - manual magnification of the originals using a macro lens, and re-photographing of the selected fragments - in itself defines a shared terrain. I venture to see this as the zone of photography as a region of matter. The photographic grain in these pictures shares the visual field with the images. The magnifying lens exposes the rich texture of photography as the writing of light. It brings into view a unique and complex grain which alludes to the play of photographic emulsions and light on sensitised paper. These images extoll their own substantiality, along with that of the photographic process. Snap Happy succeeds in foregrounding movement and matter as components of photography. Movement is signalled in the chronological narrative told by the mouths and eyes as they learn to face the camera. But movement is also embedded in each one of the images, in the unstable matter that sustains them. Photography, as a surface, belongs in a wider materiality which is undergoing permanent rearrangement, in time. No portion of matter - no matter how small or seemingly static - can escape this movement. McDonald's photos embrace this movement and play with it. Some of the original fragments were so small that their blown up versions almost escape any fixed figuration. The mouth and the eyes could well be clouds or galaxies, UFOs . . . We know that we are looking at photographic fragments of the artist's face, but do we really see less of her if again we chose to examine a detail in any of these fragments? Form and meaning are presented in this show as feeble attributes. They fall apart once magnification reaches the point of defacement. But the 'stuff' of matter itself never goes away. It remains evident as pure interiority, uncontainable, always unfolding. Looking at these images I wonder about the static character of the photographic image. Is photography really static? If we conceded that a photo, in fact, brings into view a slice of frozen time, we could be tricking ourselves into adopting a nonsensical position of materialist essentialism in which matter may be sliced into static moments. Photographic images would be eternal essences, absolved from the passage of time. As I understand it, the moment of photography is not submerged somewhere in the past - with a discrete beginning and end sanctioned by the shutter of the camera. The real moment of photography coincides with the encounter of the viewer and the photograph. The rich texture of the images in Snap Happy helps define each encounter them as a unique moment. Nothing is fully resolved about these photographs. This, to me, is their best achievement. Jorge López |
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Jacqueline McDonald,
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Jacqueline McDonald,
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© The artist and |
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