In a poem entitled 'Against Portraits', Charles Tomlinson suggests that:
if there must be
an art of portraiture,
let it show us ourselves as we
break from the image of what we are.
He argues against the 'too specific, too concluding' expressions captured by conventional portraits, and seeks to portray 'a face half hesitant, / face at the threshold:'
In this collection of solarised prints, I attempt to break away from the true-to-life hallmark of photographs and to create portraits which straddle the threshold between the photographic and the graphic. By introducing uncertainty with regard to the medium, I seek to capture that liminal quality which Tomlinson advocates for the art of portraiture.
Perhaps what I love best about this challenging medium is the linguistic paradox contained in solarisation: the effect of exposing a partly developed negative to additional light, funnily enough, is to remove the 'photo' from photography and make the image graphic.
