FOUR ATTEMPTS ON PHOTOGRAPHY AS A MEMORY METAPHOR MACHINE
The art critic John Berger stresses how an image misplaces its meaning when interpreted from different contexts. Its ambiguity arises out from that discontinuity. Berger’s notion of “abyss”, which exists between the recorded moment and the present moment of looking at the photograph from an individual, inspired me to create these four series of works.
Since I started creating my undergraduate thesis artwork during 2017-18, I’ve been fascinated by the ontology of photography. For me, photography is not merely the replacement for memory or momento. Likewise, the camera is not purely an apparatus for documentation. As a person who always emotionally responds slowly, I couldn’t produce ‘the supposed emotion’ that I ought to have when significant events happened to me. Photography is one of the approaches to express my emotion, which is not resolved by only releasing the shutter. When I revisited the old photographs, I was unsettled by how the characteristic of photographs is akin to the passage of time and death. I then attempted to reorganize my personal emotion by utilizing the characteristic of the camera and materials to explore the possibility of photography other than 2-dimensional medium.
From the fluidity of memory from those old photographs, I seek to redefine the meaning of the personal portrait, and family photographs that have brought to me. When confronted with those images during my creation, I imbued the discontinuity with my affect from different circumstances.
有关摄影作为记忆隐喻的四次尝试
艺术评论家约翰伯格曾经指出一张图像在不同语境下意义的缺失，和其暧昧不明的连续性断裂的意义：在被记录的瞬间，与当下观看的瞬间，这两个瞬间有一个不可逾越的鸿沟，他称之为“深渊”(abyss)。
在两年前创作本科毕业作品时，我便开始思考摄影的本体性。照片于我而言不止是记忆的替代品或纪念品，相机于我而言不止是记录的工具。一直以来我都是情绪反应迟钝者，在一些重大事情发生的时候我总是感受不到“应有的情绪”。摄影对我来说是情感抒发方式之一，但这种表达并不仅仅是按下快门后释放就可以解决的。在重新面对一些旧照片时，这些照片与时间的消逝，死亡的相似性带给我莫大的心理冲击。慢慢地，我梳理了一些个人情感，结合相机和物质材料的不同属性，探索影像超过平面的可能性。
利用这些影像带来的记忆流动性，与我产生的碰撞，我试图重新定义个体肖像照与家庭集体照带给我的意义。在创作中再次面对那些图像时，涌泉般喷发的情感使我在不同时空下，弥补照片中断裂和缺失的意义。