Interventions - Worthing Museum and Art Gallery, 2008

Statement about the work

Tim has used a pinhole camera to create a pair of photos about watching. Both subjects are being watched, both are watching, absorbed by what they are looking at.

A pinhole camera is a strange instrument in that it doesn't have a lens, so it can only let a tiny amount of light into the darkened box. Inside the box is photographic paper, not film. This means that the large-scale paper image comes out negative and takes a massive amount of time to expose; in this case 60 minutes.

The process of being photographed in this way is strange because one has the distinct feeling of being drawn, as if one is a life model in a drawing class. Changing position will change the image; but equally you can scratch and get back into the same position without affecting the image. Such a process is physically like drawing as the more light that's directed into the pin-hole the blacker the paper becomes; just like using a pencil or charcoal. When photography was first invented in the 19th Century many people honestly thought that there were little leprechauns inside the box, drawing the subject. This is exactly what it feels like!

As a boy Frederick Sandys might have been photographed using the pioneering 'Daguerreotype' process that was invented in 1839, when he was 10 years old. When this drawing was produced in 1894, photography had recently become a popular amateur pursuit, with Kodak having just produced the first commercially available paper prints. Photography, at this same time, was causing a crisis in confidence in realistic painting. The shift made by Paul Cézanne and other artists towards abstraction implicitly questioned the
need for accurate photographic representation in painting (like that espoused by Frederick Sandys) when photographs could show ‘reality’ so much quicker and better.

This work by Frederick Sandys is from the end of the 'Romantic' era. The Romantic Movement wasn’t about love or romantic novels, but was a time that many artists, like William Morris, were trying to re-kindle traditional certainties from the past. They often displayed an interest in medievalism, itself a direct result of their rejection of scientific rationalization, industrialisation, and the rapid growth of cities. Romantic artists (who were mostly male) also tried to convey the awe they felt when confronted by the wonders of natural beauty, whether a sublime landscape or a beautiful woman.

Image above, from the Worthing Museum collection used as inspiration: Frederick Sandys - Sweet Thoughts - 1894.

In the Digital age it’s easy to take a similarly reactionary position to technology and the Media as Romantic artists did to industry and science. We no longer believe that technology makes the world a safer or happier place, and there’s increasing concern about the way the Media manipulate us by presenting extreme
interpretations of reality as normal, desirable, or even essential.

A pair of digital prints taken from scans of large pinhole camera photographs, each 20'' x 10''

This work is opposed to the established Media by responding to an understated, natural image, and it questions the value of high-end technology. Tim has re-presented a digital video image that is unsensational and hardly moving, by taking a photograph of it using pre-digital techniques. His search is not for the sublime but for the ordinary; that essential part of life untainted by commerce and glamour. Yet both subjects remain isolated by the technology, caught in-between looking-back and looking-forward.