This Exhibition

Double Take — Images from the Digital Darkroom

Even before the digital darkroom eclipsed the analogue world of photography, the hitherto evidentiary nature of photography and video was overtaken by more conceptual approaches. The long-held association of photography and video with truth and authenticity was called into question and liberated practitioners from the limitations of documentary fidelity, allowing them to treat both as media of invention and to explore novel visual ideas in a climate that is now burdened with the fact that almost everything that CAN be photographed or filmed has BEEN recorded. Creative interest now resides in how the artist uses the possibilities offered by digital manipulation to invent worlds that tell a different story.

Many expanded works begin with representational images and are altered not with the intent to deceive the viewer or fake reality, but with the aim of adding new layers of meaning, of creating surprising juxtaposition and of disrupting conventional perspectives on the world. Some practitioners work with found images, manipulating work they did not “take” themselves; others find their raw material in their own archives or their imagination.

In this exhibition we explore both approaches. Moreover, the images are not empty exercises in technological possibilities, but will have been driven by the need to tell a story that has contemporary resonance.

Amy Eilertsen addresses a range of issues including the dichotomy between the detrimental effects of atmospheric atomic testing and the post-world war II optimism in America. She emphasises the human phenomenon of being blind to uncomfortable truths.  Eilertsen also makes images that reflect her personal, lived response to the stresses of inadequate resourcing and the emotional toll of witnessing the daily human tragedies she encountered in her work as a nurse during the current Covid pandemic.

Bharat Patel’s photographic practice has, until recently, been dedicated to documenting people and places in Africa and India. For the current exhibition, he has multiplexed images to tell single image documentary stories of workers and has also created a suite of dream-like images of Oxford; many of them imagining what might happen to his home city by the Thames River if global water levels did rise sufficiently to threaten life and livelihoods.

Uwe Ackermann combines observation, reason and tongue-in-cheekiness to generate something unexpected, something hidden, sometimes puzzling, sometimes telling. His intention is to transport the viewer elsewhere, emotionally, conceptually and aesthetically and elicit a reaction, a smile, an unexpected interpretation.

Terry Flaxton is widely recognised as an artist who creates challenging moving image work that has been featured in a variety of publications and is collected widely.