Photography as a tool of alienation: aura (Chapter 7)

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5406-8_7

Regular photographic imaging records volumetric planes with smooth surfaces. The reason is the camera’s defi ciency in perceiving and documenting the visual richness of “persuasive” details in life. HDR imaging methods used in creating the artwork series titled Aura helped invisible textures to emerge through different exposures and layering multiple surfaces in an image. A major objective in this series was to facilitate the experiential visual complexity between the animate and inanimate to emerge that cannot otherwise be recorded. The intention was to achieve a new symbiotic painterly visual relationship between biological (humans) and non- biological (space) through the rich textures achieved after high-dynamic-range- imaging (HDRI) procedures. The chapter will focus on photography as a tool of personal world making, instead of photography as witnessing. In unfolding this practice notions of superimposition, palimpsest, painting vs. photography, truth and photography as an apparatus to provoke de-familiarisation will be covered. The aim is to confi rm photography as a visual language that enriches and transforms human perception.