Drift by Duncan Wooldridge

The minute by minute and day by day succession of photographs that Vilém Flusser has called the “universe of technical images” is a continuous passage, an endless reveal. One photograph quickly emerges, and does so only to be superseded by another soon after: a quick burst of information, a rapid sensation, gone in a moment, and quickly followed by the same: in the slideshow, or in the loose stack of small, printed images held in the hand; in the pages of the book or on the scrolling screen; one image appears after another. Everywhere an image. Everywhere at least one more. We are long past observing the superabundance of our photographs or remarking that we are visually overloaded – Lucia Moholy notices that this complaint is commonplace already in 1939 in her remarkable One Hundred Years of Photography – but we could stop to critically observe an inherent multiplicity that is always already in play in each and every photograph. 

Each image which finds its way into the world is accompanied by several others that provide its surrounds and contexts. Photographs appear as sets, albums, and collections, and congregate in piles or mounds. They sit together in packets and boxes, and present themselves in lines and grids, arrays and clusters. Let us expand on this multiplicity just a little further. Already at the moment of their making, there is a pile of pictures which will no longer be looked at, no longer considered. This image might be one of many similar views: a second or third or fourth photograph made to ensure the moment is captured in a way that is just right. Similar or dissimilar frames emerge from an analogue or digital storage system, selected from what must already constitute a multitude. Our habits for producing photographs are largely ritualistic and socially conditioned and also multiple – many of our photographs look the same and are quickly recognisable as conforming to genres or types. But we shouldn’t forget the camera and its programming, which has often without our knowing or comprehension, compressed several exposures together into an assemblage, combined exposures to maximise dynamic range or stacked exposures to ensure sharpness all over. Machine learning uses millions of images to learn what can be removed and how elements of the image can be replaced seamlessly. 

How are we to begin to conceptualise that each photograph is always already one of many? How are we to think through what we are to do with all of these images, most of which are used and then cast away? Daniel Rapley’s Drift gives form to a collision that offers a possibility. Two heterogeneous images are rephotographed and combined: montaged together, they construct and reveal unstable grounds and complex surfaces. A mixture of the familiar and the far away, at a disjunction which we might be tempted to deconstruct, but to what end? Are we in one frame or the other? What does it matter? We could disassemble the photographs, but we (and the figures contained within each frame) find ourselves in new territories, sites of possibility. The collision points us to something more demanding, and more compelling: an emergence, beyond brief appearance, familiarity and redundancy. If there is a pleasure in and a delight in the saturation of warm and cool colours colliding, there is also unease in their irresolvable complexity, their mixture of layers and proximities. Seeing their coming together, now, if we were to separate the images, it would feel as though a remainder were left hanging. One part of the image would stick to the other as they were torn apart.

Sourced from house clearances, Rapley’s use of discarded 35mm slides speaks to the visible and the invisible, to the conditions of appearance and disappearance which condition our mediascape. Drift shows scenes from work and everyday life overlapping with moments of leisure: the photographs are returned to use after a period of disappearance, and we can see that images live the lives of doubles, being both extremely specific and easily unmoored from their original contexts. Slides are made with a now-abandoned technology, and the remaining photographs are acquired from sites where they were left behind. Doubly disavowed, in what Jonathan Crary might call their stubborn resistance to being clicked away in an instant. They prompt us to perceived the photograph as a thing, an image and object. Several detailed abstractions, close up fragments of the slides, linger over dust and scratches, their emulsions cracking or splitting over vivid colour grounds. The photographs in Drift function as a means of seeing the photograph where it might otherwise masquerade as a transparent window. 

With its extremely sophisticated devices, photography usually directs us towards a singular event of capture, an obsession with a perfect moment seemingly natural but deeply constructed. The tools used to achieve this effect stitch together the appearance of one moment, smoothing over joins and assembly as though this was an icon untouched and made in a moment without the hand (acheiropoieta). In an essay in which he observes and ultimately critiques the desire to distance ourselves from our mediated encounters with the world, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han observes that in everyday culture “[m]ediation and representation are viewed as a lack of transparency and inefficiency – as temporal and informational congestion” which perpetuates this illusionistic claim to photography’s uninterruptedness. This congestion that Han describes is the world, the very reality of endless production and continuous reception. The world is mediated, and our images are mediators. At moments our photographs are both like the world whilst at others they are strange and unfamiliar, creating new spaces and new possibilities. This is their genuine magic, and not their reduction to a single moment or a misleadingly untouched perfection. The complexity of the world as it might really be – material, social, economic, contingent – the messy ensemble of an image and its noise and granularities, offers one of visual culture’s  antidotes: worlds with their many positions and many voices. 

Photography’s continuities and discontinuities, evident in Rapley’s assemblages, are the coming together of distant spaces which begin to allow us to observe plausible connections as well as moments of departure and disconnect. In one image, a row of office tables is overlaid with the many greens of a garden, making sterile environs wild and abundant. In an image with a pink cast, furniture in the foreground opens through a doorway to an avenue of palm-lined trees, connected by a patterned terrazzo floor which belongs to the outside but activates a passage between one image and another. The palms appear both inside and outside, as if cast onto the wall by a camera obscura. Notably, the same terrazzo appears alongside a hazy, out of focus portal, reminding us of the images permeability and permutations. In some of Rapley’s constructions, two photographs are combined upside down relative to each other, furthering our awareness of the image and its movements. The artist, by receiving, organising and finding new combinations amongst his collection of many images, shows us also how the conditions of production and reception are interlinked: to look is to know how to organise, continue or disrupt the world and its modes of appearance, and to view the image is then to be involved in what it brings about. If the images permit only a partial recognition of their contents, their capacity to float freely from their original signifiers prompt a dreaming or imagining which reveals another of the photograph’s double functions: to remember and continue, but also to bring into being.