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Unlike realist painting, photography is not as beset with the question of ‘que peindre?’—‘what should I paint?’, ‘what should I represent?’. This is a paradox that is perhaps rooted in the very rapidity and ease of photographic representation. With the invention of the Kodak instamatic camera in 1880, the amateur was able to photograph anything in sight. Photography had quickly been formalised within the conventions established by landscape and portraiture painting. It had also become an integral tool in social gatherings and in travel, where the act of representing became a ceremonial way of registering the event, an act that was inclined to subsume the resulting image. Despite or because of this, photographic specialists were increasingly concerned with how photography made its presence felt, in both high and low forms. And as photography became normative within society, with the invention of colour, and with a growing minority of photographers calling themselves artists, photography also became conscious of what it could not achieve. Unlike painting, photography could, ostensibly at least, achieve anything in the realm of image-making. This is its weakness. Whereas painting’s shortcoming is built into the language of gesture itself, and this is turned into a virtue, photography is hampered by its own superficial perfection. Its verisimilitude is prone to engender either boredom or distrust.
Debra Phillips’s practice has long been concerned with the ways in which culture is embodied within photographic representation. Embodiment is an important term here, for Phillips’s work has constantly sought to transcend the simplistic notion of a medium acting under the service of subjective intent. Rather Phillips’s work understands photography according to a complex fabric of both exposure and repression: while in the service