Just as photography was thought to herald the death of painting1 in the 19th century, digital technology is now starting to make the future of photography look rather uncertain. The computer has begun to take the place of the darkroom, and skill with a camera is probably regarded by many as a quaintly anachronistic craft. Painting of course continues to survive regular threats to its life, and no doubt photography will too; in fact the development of technical advances and alternatives has, as in the past, caused artists to intensify the exploration of their medium and what it can do.
Brisbane photographer Joachim Froese does this by resisting the use of a computer altogether when making images, and instead examining more deeply the intrinsic properties of photography, in the way impressionist painters were prompted by photography to examine more deeply the distinctive properties of paint.
Froese works exclusively in black and white, printing relatively small images (by contemporary standards) and using only photographic paper made from natural fibres rather than synthetic polymers. It is a stringently purist approach to photography and the resulting images capture some of the sense of arcane strangeness that the mysterious chemical process must have aroused when it was first developed.
Froese is best known for multiple-image panoramas of tiny dramatic scenes that he stages using dead insects as the performers. Enlarged into photographic polyptychs, these post-mortem antics are like theatre of the absurd in miniature.
Little particles of dust and grit on the narrow ledge where the (in)action takes place become like rubble in a derelict interior, where epic moments of confrontation, struggle and defeat are enacted by dead bugs in a metaphoric commentary... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline