LISA TOMASETTI’S PHOTOGRAPHY
In his discussion of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, the historian and critic Eduardo Cadava evocatively describes the body as ‘the darkened tomb of memory’.1 Like the dark room in which Proust’s protagonist, Marcel, awakens to find himself enveloped by a succession of whirling memories and impressions, the body registers and is inscribed with memory. To Cadava, this darkened room is also a photographic space. Images are recorded in a state of darkness, where bodies, memories, light and shadows dissolve into each other and merge in new ways.
This shifting, metaphorical relation between memory, the body, the dark room and the camera is made manifest in the recent work of the Australian photographer Lisa Tomasetti. A child emerges from a deep, dense blackness in Tomasetti’s series, Vanilla and Misfortune, 2005. Shot in the artist’s shadowy, cavernous rented studio, these black and white photographs of Tomasetti’s own child literally arise out of darkness. The studio is a silent, ‘joyous dark space’ that allows both Tomasetti and her child to focus and share ideas. As a womb-like space in which images of childhood are created, this dark room is itself a metaphor for both the photographic camera and the maternal relation that binds the photographer and her subject.
Like memory, these images of childhood are dense, slippery and interwoven with nostalgia. Tomasetti seeks to unsettle ‘the presumption of childhood innocence’ in this series. As adults, we often look back on our own childhoods with a sense of nostalgia in which memories are rewritten or reinvented in order to conform to our expectations of what it is to be a child. Timeless and androgynous against a deep black ground, it... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline