Emulsion, comprising over eighty archival photographs and selected contemporary works, focuses on results of photographic work that were impossible to anticipate.
Emulsion (Emulsja) revolves around supposed loss. Marta Przybyło-Ibadullajev, the author of the book's concept, is interested in fading faces and cracked glass panes.
We are happy to see the damage, because we are familiar with it, just like with the process of ageing. When looking at a decaying photograph from today's perspective, we assign new values to it; it becomes valuable in itself.
Nowadays, when the process of taking photographs is shorter than it ever was, the thing which elevates its status and gives it dignity is fake damage, simulating the passing of time affecting the image. Having undergone damages, it becomes more real. An unintended mistake is fascinating because it escapes reason, it cannot be controlled, or, in other words, fully known. Pixels aren't distorted by time, however, but by app's filters.
Emulsion mostly features accidental damage. They are irrational and uncontrolled by reason, so are they perhaps closer to our emotions? This emphasis on the damages of an image is a polemic with the idea of photography as hallucination, expressed by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. A decaying photograph ceases to be “false on the level of perception,” because it is validated by its fragility and susceptibility to time.
These properties do not occur in works that make intentional use of mistakes, which immediately stops it from being one (or perhaps it never was a mistake). Damage becomes an aesthetic technique which is sometimes saved by turning it into a joke.
A damaged photograph, despite its low documentary and commercial value, lures and attracts.
– Marta Przybyło-Ibadullajev.
Contemporary culture accentuates novelty and revelation, it is the unknown that excites within it. The surprise element in looking at damaged photographic emulsion might be the necessity to concentrate here and now, on the presence and reality, while rejecting any imports, contexts, and dominant meanings.
Embeded gallery style
display gallery as slider
Photographs (objects) aren't real memories, because they don't belong to reality, but merely imitate it. Thanks to unplanned damages a photograph stops being tautological. It is no more just a reflection of reality that reassures as that what we are looking at is what it is, but it belongs to that reality and hence becomes more like a memory.
Publisher: Archeology of Photography Foundation
Language version: Polish – English
Authors: Marta Przybyło-Ibadullajev (concept, text), Sławomir Sikora, Monika Supruniuk (captions).
Michał Dąbrowski, 7/09/2015, transl. Ania Micińska