The Photographic Object
Artists from The Photographic Object at The Photographer's Gallery explore the ambiguous space between the two dimensional photographic form and the three dimensional physical world by stitching, overlaying, cutting, piercing and punching their work.
As a result, their work goes beyond the photographed surface, to have more than just decorative or hermetic functions and instead is an object in its own right and on its own terms, thus exploring photography as an object. The works of Maurizio Anzeri, Walead Beshty, Vanessa Billy, Annette Kelm, Gerrhard Richter, Alina Szapocznikow, Wolfgang Tilmans, Andy Warhol and Catherine Yass can all be seen at this exhibition.
Maurizio Anzeri's series of black and white family portraits stitched with layers of coloured patterns across the face add physical prominence to the images and suggests underlying psychological characteristics to the photographed subjects. Anzeri's work seems to emphasise individuality, differences and appearance as a means of exploring photographic objects.
Whereas Walead Beshty adopts a very physical approach by creasing and rolling photographic paper to create very powerful, colourful abstract photograms, thus exploring the separation of the physical and image world. Vanessa Billy's work located in the Project Space on the ground floor incorporates photographs and collages with three dimensional materials and objects. Her work seemed to be the most baffling at first, but after realising her intention to confuse the functions of seeing and understanding, it became more apparent that upon closer inspection each object or photograph had distinct associations with each other. 
Polish sculptor Alina Szapocnikow's ‘Photosculptures' was probably one of the more visually effective pieces at demonstrating photographic objects in its simplest form. Her work consisted a series of black and white photographs of chewing gum ‘sculptures', produced by moulding the pieces of chewing gum in her mouth and photographing the results individually.
The fact that she chose to print only in black and white seems to focus purely on the varying shapes of her chewing gum so that the importance of form and structure is highlighted in her message to convey photographic objects. Andy Warhol on the other hand repeated images of male nudes and stitched them back together, which undermined the principal aims of photography and turned his work into obsessive, fetishistic and slightly unsettling if not disturbing objects.
There is more to photography than just capturing imagery. Unfortunately most of us probably have not considered or realized this leaving us blissfully unaware of the material potential of a photograph. At least we now have The Photographic Objectexhibition at The Photographer's Gallery till mid June to enlighten us about unconventional functions and forms of photography.Find out more here
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