A-drift by Ashley Gallant

If Photography can be understood as memory materialised

When Photography can be understood as memory materialised

Photography can be understood as memory materialised.

It attempts to turn light, that which is perceived internally, wave like, fluid and ungraspable into that which is solid, graspable, holdable, ownable.  

An inherently material practice, making photos is the shift from airy and fluid to sticky and heavy.  

Photography is a specific form of alchemy.

The light hits the substrate and sticks, penetrates the surface, and becomes one, inseparable, trapped and captured.  

To fix the image, to make settle, become stagnant, requires it to be stopped. To stop its movement. 

To end. 

To be fixed. 

But not straight away. At first the light is unstable, the image hovers above the substrate searching for a home, 

     somewhere to land, 

            this floating airy possibility of an image is 

                                                                                                            adrift. 

It’s the inside of this unstable process, between light, flow, wave, floating, hovering, almost being, possibility and fixedness, endings, stickiness and heaviness that Rapley’s work takes as its interest. 

Rapley collects 35mm photographic slides, often of unknown others, unknown others on unknown holidays. 

Away

Afar

abroad.

Rapley stacks.

The transparency of the slide format allows these stacks to create doubled images, doubled images, 

Images layered

Images layered

abstracted. 

Rapley sees through and onto. Between and adhered to. Attention is focused on both the image and the surface of the photographic object.

Slides have a unique dual functionality; light not only forms the image fixed on the clear materials surface, but to understand this image, to make the image visible, light must pass both onto and through the image surface. 

Slides are designed to be looked through, to be seen from both sides.

Back and forth. 

This see-through-ness means they can easily be viewed backwards, reversed, flipped in doing so creating an upside down, back to front mirrored world.  Their transparency builds into the medium itself the stacking and overlaying of images, time periods, memories. 

The transparency of the slide provides a double risk of damage and misunderstanding compared to the usually static and fixed photographic print. 

Slides reliance on light traveling through them welcome the reversal, collection and projection of surface damage.  

Rapley’s attention attempts to settle simultaneously on the slides surface and the image it contains, both on physical dust and decay, and the ungraspable but visible past that the slide holds. 

Rapley’s position of attack circles and floats around instability and impossibility, attempting to see through and onto a surface at the same time.

Looking through ripples on water to read the lakebed. 

To see both onto surface and through surface. 

Separate and inseparable. 

The eye constantly moves, back, forth, on and through. This instability of the image to settle mirroring our inability to understand and anchor memory. 

Photographs seem unnervingly solid within an unstable sea of visual memory.

Rapley’s focus is on the surfaces of memory. 

Just as photography attempts to make the most fluid of states, memory, solid, but only acts to make clear that our memories are often rewritten and misremembered. Fragmentary at best. Rapley’s depth of field sharpens both object and noise into focus, he flattens and disintegrates the hierarchy between image and surface, 

between now and then, 

image and shape, 

dust and memory, 

remembered and glimpsed. 

Rapley removes the singular position of the photographic focus, and replaces it for both macro and micro, image and surface, memory and material, joined and inseparable.

Rapley’s flattening complicates our ability to focus on content or surface individually, making our understanding unsteady.  

Close observation of the slide as object allows us to evidence how both object and memory are formed and understood and how both can pick up detritus, dust, extra visual information and misunderstandings as time passes. 

He makes clear the failures in this process. How the material outcomes of photography, contains and is inseparable from the instability of images to hold, contain, capture, and communicate the past.  How images rather than clearly evidence a life lived, make clear the impossibility to understand others’ lives.  

Rapley’s work is about stacking. Stacking of slides, of images, of memories and dust and time and understanding and meanings. 

Rapley’s work is stacking of instability.