Current Projects - Daniel Boetker-Smith

The basis for my PhD research (by practice) called ‘The Crime Seen: Dialogues between Abstract Painting and Contemporary Photography’ that is supervised by Dr. David Sweet and Professor Pavel Büchler at Manchester Metropolitan University is concerned with the relationship between photography and painting and the themes of gesture, looking, and mark-making that connect the two disciplines. I am writing about the work of three artists in particular, the Australian photographer Bill Henson, the Belgian photographer and film-maker Marie Francoise-Plissart and the American painter Christopher Wool. This PhD is expected to be completed by 2008/2009.

My current practice is specifically concerned with the ways photography interacts with painting. I am influenced by and interested in artists who work across and between disciplines like Gerhard Richter, Christopher Wool, Marie-Francoise Plissart and Dieter Roth (to name a few). My photographic practice is a means for me to explore the process or act of making images; my work explores the instance of generation of the photographic image and surface.

In my practice I am building up a body of work that is focussed on the notion of the autoscopic instant – the hallucination or illusion of seeing oneself. The photographs I am producing pay attention to or draw attention to my presence in the act of making the image. The use of the flash repeatedly reflected within the image locates a blind spot centrally in each photograph. Just as Bataille describes (when discussing Van Gogh) trying to look into the sun by holding your hand up before your face as a screen, or a blinder, the flash in my images is a seeing and a not-seeing – it is where sight is enabled and extinguished. The theme of the gesture is closely connected to autoscopy in that the gesture as it is understood in terms of painting (predominantly mark-making, tearing and staining – particular aspects of painting) references the presence of the artist and the attempt to show the act or the process of painting. As the painting that is overtly gestural, stained or torn announces the physicality of the artist so too the gesture (the flash) within the photograph announces the act of photographing. The flash draws attention to the presence of the photographic apparatus and the photographer in the very middle of the scene.
The aesthetic influence of crime-scene photography is at the forefront (influenced by Weegee, the LAPD Archives and Christopher Wool) of this research project. The repetitive and laborious photographing of spaces in this work is fixated on the capture of details. The crime-scene photograph shows (or attempts to show) a moment or an incident that has slipped away irretrievably, it can only speculate about what happened in that criminal instant. The moment the crime-scene photograph records is always the wrong moment – it is (like autoscopy) both a showing and a non-showing. Photographs of a crime-scene seem to reference the act of photographing first and the crime second. In the work of Christopher Wool (photographing half-finished paintings, or stain-ridden Manhattan sidewalks) and the photographic montages of Bill Henson (images cut up and rearranged), the act of creating the photograph is perhaps the central focus of the images but there is also a criminal element implicated, something sinister has happened or is about to happen. These works relate the photographic to the criminal and to photography’s ability to be partial, obscure and to fabricate.
My visual work takes the themes explored in the relationship between the criminal instant and the photographic instant as a starting and in turn relates it to contemporary abstract painting - particularly Torie Begg and her use of the ‘flaw’, and Jason Martin’s method of painting that through its physicality references the gesture of painting and the artist’s interaction with the surface of the image, the painterly act or instant. In referencing the painterly gesture, stain and tear, my work retraces the photographic image’s connection to the moment of its generation and therefore to the physical processes of making and taking a photograph and argues that the images I discuss/make are about that instant and about drawing that instant out to the surface of the photograph in order to open a dialogue between abstract painting and photography. Through this research it is my intention to produce images that investigate photographic visuality, and question what a photograph is and what a photographer does.

Places 2007