Cloud explores thinking through photography, using pictures from the curator’s own collection as examples. The exhibition encourages adopting a new perspective on areas of photographic practice that may be considered outdated or negligible.
Scrutiny of the habit of thematic pigeonholing is the starting point, as embracing such restrictive categorisations ultimately consigns large swaths of photographic output to obscurity. A binary approach to surveying the medium invariably ends up sealing off entire avenues of meaning (perhaps the most interesting) that remain ripe for reexamination. After all, the essence of any picture resides in that within it which transcends divisions; in mutual relationships and unrecognised affinities; in connections rooted not just in the image, but in art, in craft, in life itself.
To a collector-curator, however, neither subject nor provenance nor timestamp on a print is as important as the potential for contemporary and personal readings. Cloud, therefore, focuses not on classificatory context but on what is immediately visible to the looker, even when what is visible is perhaps contrary to original intent: a traitorous colour that emerged unsolicited, an artificial hue, tones that have shifted with the passage of time, and the ambiguity of an image, its internal ambivalence. Another focus is on subjects that were once of great and general interest, but which have since come to be disregarded as outmoded or exhausted, as in the case of pictures of obsolete machinery or of bodies.
Cloud seeks to corner viewers with images and is an attempt at organising that remarkable, endlessly mutating organism that is the language of photography. It also covers the objectives and responsibilities of the curator or the essayist writing about the dialects of photography, and the preliminary choices both must make.
