Absence

Photographs of Absence can be as arresting as photographs of Presence.

It is challenging for photography to reveal what is not in front of the camera’s lens, but I think it is a quest worth considering.

Perhaps it may be thought of as an emphatic gap in and of presence. What may have been there is now simply missing; the lack of certainty that it was ever there in the first place, but glimpsed nevertheless, out of the corner of one’s mind’s eye.

How to evoke this without being inhibited by what is seen.

I am not thinking of the deliberate removal of a political rival from a print. But maybe the burnt shadows created by the blast of nuclear explosions over Japan come close.

The origins of this sequence of photographs are the traces left on the walls of the Fitzwilliam Museum, where paintings that may have hung for a considerable period have been removed and replaced. They left behind photograms on the wall coverings created by the daily transition of the sun over a period of months or years of exposure.

Traces, outlines, silhouettes and ghost images have come into soft focus. Colour and tonal changes have evolved, marking an unintentional and unnamable existence that I have interpreted.