Moving the Image: photography and its actions

Moving The Image proposes that the contemporary conditions of photography might be best understood through an expanded conception of its actions, gestures and performativities. The conventional still/moving dialectic that focuses upon what is within and not around the image, which shapes many conventional discourses of the photographic, belies a multitude of industrial and social functions which constitute a wider ‘photographic universe’, including processes of production, interventions and mediations, and formal and informal channels of distribution.

The exhibition proposes that photographic images are not at all static, but are instead shaped and altered through a multitude of processes and encounters, becoming, performative and playful. Exhibiting the work of contemporary artists experimenting with the photograph's forms and manifestations, the exhibition explores how the photographic image comes about through a creative tussle between the human and the machinic: doing so, it proposes a photography beyond the romantic language of the photographer's eye, or the doubtful neutrality the document. In its place, photography emerges as a complex, contradictory and challenging object, acting with us and upon us. 

Artists in the exhibition include: Lou Cantor, Liz Deschenes, Discipula, David Horvitz, Steff Jamieson, Kensuke Koike, Taisuke Koyama, Louise Lawler, John MacLean, Sarah Pickering, Salvo, Dayanita Singh, Clare Strand, Dafna Talmor, Edouard Taufenbach and Corinne Vionnet. The exhibition will include a special new iteration of Sarah Pickering’s Reverse Pickpocket and Pickpocket Workshop, originally commissioned for Manifesta 11, Zurich, in 2016.

The exhibition is accompanied by a teaching symposium on 17 April 2019 at Camberwell College of Arts which will explore current and future practices in teaching and learning in fine art photography. The day will include keynote presentations by Duncan Wooldridge (curator of the exhibition, and Camberwell BA Fine Art Photography Course Leader) and writer and curator Emma Lewis (Tate), alongside a variety of short workshops.