the child in contemporary photography'
Photographers have always been fascinated by the metaphors that accrue to photography. The idea of the latent image, and the virtual reality that it manifests, is compelling and appears to mirror the conscious and unconscious workings of the human psyche as the negative image buried in the unconscious mind becomes a positive conscious imprint. The idea of light writing itself; the concept of the latent image waiting to become ' real ', and the way in which the concept of time is altered and interfered with makes photography a magical process, even though it has been heralded as a rational tool.2 Many critics have commented on the life/death metaphor within photography, whereby time is both mortified (frozen/embalmed) and made immortal (ever present, although absent). These ideas all impact on psychological processes : memory, perception, illusion and, of course, desire. A desire that writes its memory, captures its moment it time, re-creates its fantasies and phantasms.
Thus the early art photographers made composite photographs of fantasy scenes, amateur photographers on the seance circuit proclaimed that spirit could write itself onto the photographic plate, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (inventor of the intrepid Sherlock Holmes) was convinced that two little girls in rural England had taken photographs of real fairies at the bottom of their garden.3 Today we can follow the history of UFOs on the internet, find archives of photographic evidence of alien beings, generations of ghosts haunting the pages of the world wide web and we can have our aura photographed at New Age fairs4. These examples are predicated on manipulations of the photograph and its contexts that play with the photographer's, the subject's, and the viewer's desire. Photography can... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline