TEMPORARILY REMOVED | 1999 - 2017
School children around the display of 'Ginger' in the British Museum. The moment of this loud busy scene happening around the quietness of the inside of the glass vitrine has always touched me about this image. The British Museum: I started taking photographs in the British Museum in 1999, not long after my MA studies in Photography at the London College of Communication. One of the first results that really captivated me from the moment I saw it appearing in the developer dish (in the darkroom that was set up in my kitchen) was the photo shown here on the left. It shows a scene around the display case of the famous naturally preserved pre-dynastic Egyptian mummy, 'Ginger'. I credit this photo with turning what was only an experimental exploration into a serious preoccupation with the photography of museum spaces and museum scenes. I remember my own utter fascination when seeing an unwrapped mummy for the first time as a child in the Senkenberg Museum in Frankfurt. The encounter with death, either directly through exhibited human remains or more subtly through objects of the departed, is to me an all-pervading issue in museums and hence a focus for my photography. Some of my thoughts on the issue of encountering death in the museum and the relationship between museums and photography have been published in the essay: 'Photography - Museum: On Posing, Imageness and the Punctum'. This essay presents an excerpt of my PhD thesis 'On Posing' - where I also talk about this image. I chose the series title, 'Temporarily Removed' quite simply in reference to the signs that are sometimes in place when exhibits are temporarily removed from display. Through increasing calls for the repatriation of certain artefacts, the title today receives a new charge and a certain irony. Being well aware of the problematic issues of all such large Western national collections, does not diminish my love for the British Museum. I have counted myself lucky to live closeby and to be able to pop in there any time -with or without my camera- with no entrance fee to pay. I edited this collection of image pairs in 2017. Presenting image pairs rather than single images immediately introduces comparison and sequence into the reading process. This also emphasises the photographic moment as well as the subjectivity of the camera viewpoint, especially where the image pair shows the same scene/object. For exhibition these images are printed in different sizes from the negatives on silver-gelatin paper. I have a collection of many, many more images and the diptychs are just one of many possible presentations. I used my beloved Nikon FA and the now discontinued Kodak T-Max 3200 negative film on a rating of ISO 6400 to be able to only use ambient light with very short shutter speeds. I developed these films myself at home and made my own prints mostly using fibre-based silver-gelatin paper. I continue to be a fan of the beautiful grain these negatives produce. Together, a super low depth of field and the large grain produce a wonderful crisp yet 'low-res' aesthetic that I have subsequently continued to use for many more projects. Whilst I also enthusiastically embraced digital cameras from the onset, this is a photographic style that is simply unique to analogue photography. No digital filter I know of can produce this grain. Equally, reproducing scans of negatives or prints here online together with the necessary compression to keep file sizes reasonable produces noise/artefact/grain that is completely different to the analogue grain. Ironically, the grain means that image compression requires a very high compression/low-quality setting to achieve file sizes suitable for a website. I was even thinking of removing the magnifier from these images for that reason but I still think it shows a suitable substitute 'graininess' and allows for extra detail to be explored.