The Abstract Image (2024)

Abstraction Was Photography's Late Arrival

Painting reached non-representation around 1910 and never really looked back. Photography could not follow, because a lens is a describing instrument and the negative keeps insisting that something stood in front of it. Abstract photography therefore developed as a set of techniques for defeating the camera's own competence — for making a machine built to record fail usefully. The forty-two works in this edition, credited between 2018 and 2023, survey those techniques and what remains once description has been removed.

Four Routes Out of Description

Most abstract photography arrives by one of four means. The first is movement: long exposures and intentional camera movement, which convert form into direction and speed. The second is scale, where extreme proximity or extreme distance strips away the cues that would let a viewer name the subject. The third is camera-less work — photograms, chemigrams, cliché verre — in which light and chemistry act on the sensitised surface directly. The fourth is intervention after capture, whether in the darkroom, in the printing substrate, or in the file. This catalog contains examples of all four, and the routes are not always distinguishable in the finished print.

The Referent Refuses to Leave

A painted abstraction can be about nothing. A photographic abstraction is almost always about something the viewer cannot identify, which is a different condition entirely. The eye keeps working, testing the image against known objects, and that restlessness is the genre's distinguishing pleasure rather than a defect. It also sets a limit: the moment a viewer names the subject, the abstraction collapses into a close-up. Much of the craft in experimental photography consists of staying on the right side of that threshold — legible as form, illegible as thing.

Accident as Method

Photographic abstraction has always drawn on accidents that were first regarded as faults. Fogging, flare, halation, reticulation, uneven development and light leaks were problems to be eliminated long before they were effects to be pursued. Man Ray's rayographs came out of a darkroom mistake; solarisation was a mishandled print. The contemporary equivalents include expired film, deliberately mismatched chemistry, sensor artefacts and scanner interference. What separates method from mess is repeatability. A photographer who can produce the accident twice has acquired a technique.

Titles Do a Great Deal of Work Here

In non-representational photography the title is often the only verbal handle a viewer is given, and its register sets the terms of the encounter. A number or a coordinate insists on formal reading. A word borrowed from geology or music invites metaphor. A title that names the actual subject, as several works in this exhibition do, converts the piece from abstraction into revelation and rewards a second look with new information. None of these choices is neutral, and inconsistency across a body of work is usually more conspicuous than any single decision.

Why the Theme Recurs

Abstract work is where new equipment shows up first, because every sensor, film stock and processing pipeline has characteristic failures, and photographers interested in abstraction find them before anyone else does. TCG Gallery is an independent online photography gallery, and each juried exhibition remains part of a permanent public archive after its run ends, so these catalogs accumulate into a longer record than any single project. Photographers can enter the current photography open calls directly.