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Photography’s etymology as ‘light-writing’ has long been invoked to describe its immediate relationship to the ‘real’. From Henry Fox Talbot’s ‘pencil of nature’ to semiotic analyses of the photographic index, light has been cast as the agent through which reality directly imprints itself onto photographic emulsion. Natural, generative and intimately connected to the metaphysics of truth, light has functioned as a stabilising force in photographic discourse. In Danielle Thompson’s photography, however, light is transformed into a capricious and highly volatile agent. As it saturates her camera and seeps into her finished prints, this amorphous luminosity works both to reproduce and subvert the discursive limits of Thompson’s chosen medium.
A critical sense of play between incongruous discourses and forms pervades Thompson’s oeuvre. Her exhibition, ‘Chasing Shadows’ (1992 Stills Gallery) juxtaposed bodily fragments with blurred and slightly distorted landscape photographs. The neck, chest and torso were isolated as sites where emotional distress and tension are physically manifested in the body and were allied to a theme of memory and place via the psychological space of the landscapes. Later developed in the series ‘Vast as the Dark of Night’ (1995) and ‘From Land and Sea’ (1998), these fragmented and psychologised land and seascapes came to bear the load of Thompson’s interest in the power of light to convey emotion in photography.
Symbolically, Thompson’s tumultuous seas, dark shadows and lens distortions bear an obvious psychological dimension. ‘Providence’ (2001), her series of small, square, type C photographs of ominous skies looming over lush hillsides, are landscapes imbued with all of the fragility and force of the psyche. However, the metaphoric relation between the ‘dark room’ of the camera’s interior and the photographer’s psychological state... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline