Photography as Expanding Form: Virtual and actual expansion in the work of Saron Hughes and Martina Corry

Abstract

This article considers the notion of expanding photography in relation to the work of Saron Hughes and Martina Corry. Both artists produce work that challenges conventional readings of the photograph. Hughes’ A1 Still Life causes pictorial confusion — within photographic representation— and suggests the possibility of virtual expansion. Corry’s Colour Works series also generates pictorial ambiguity, yet this arises from the actual expansion of the photograph. Shaped into three-dimensional forms, Colour Works posits the photograph as an object. These distinct examples of expanding photography both employ folding as a method. Their contrasting approaches converge in their exploration of the fold’s ability to transform a flat paper surface into a three-dimensional form. This article explores the operations of the fold through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Hughes’ and Corry’s expanding photography correlates with accounts of internally and externally generated media expansion (derived from Rosalind Krauss and Peter Osborne). The virtual and actual expansion of photography here will be read in conjunction with art historical and theoretical notions of medium.

Acknowledgements

This paper was first written in response to the Expanded Photographies conference at Southampton Solent University in 2012. I am grateful to Tom Slevin for the invitation. I would also like to thank Saron Hughes and Martina Corry for their helpful responses to my queries, and for providing their artwork and copyright.

Notes

1. The idea of expanding media can be traced back to early twentieth century avant-garde practice. The work of Moholy-Nagy is of interest here since he not only produced experimental photograms (including crumpled photograms similar to Corry) but he also demonstrated a concern with photographic and filmic reflexivity, with the materiality of the medium and with a deconstruction of its components.

2. Personal interview with the artist Saron Hughes on 25 April 2007 and a subsequent email in 2015 which transcribed the artist’s notes from the time that she was working on the A1 Still Life series. Hughes’ notes reference how she was interested in “Žižek’s definitions of the Real (through Lacan) as that which resists symbolisation”. She further references Žižek’s account of the objet petit a as — “precisely the paradoxical object generated by language itself as its ‘fall-off’, as the material left over of the purely self-referential movement of signifiers” (Žižek 145).

3. Hantaï himself referred to his work as “le pliage comme méthode”. See Candler Hayes): “1960 is often seen as a turning point in his work, with the emergence of ‘folding as method’ (le pliage comme méthode) that he has explored in one form or another in the decades since: canvases folded or crumpled, painted or written upon in different ways, stretched or left folded” (see section ‘I. “Travaux de lecture”’ para. 4).

4. In “Art and Space” Heidegger asserts that “the sculptured body embodies something” and that “sculpture deals with artistic space” (3). Heidegger further reflects on whether sculpture comprises “an occupying of space, a domination of space” (3).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sandra Plummer

Sandra Plummer is a Teaching Fellow in the History and Theory of Art at the UCL Slade School of Fine Art. Her PhD thesis, “Photography after Deleuze: Ontology, Reflexivity and Materiality”, examined contemporary self-referential photography. Her articles on contemporary photography have been published in Photoworks, Source, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge and Philosophy of Photography (for which she is also an Associate Editor). Her research on photographic objecthood includes the curation of “Photography’s New Materiality” for the National Media Museum [http://eitherand.org/].