Output details

Echoes of Epstein

Echoes of Epstein explores photography’s potential to connote human fragility and mortality. It is a photographic series that investigates the materiality of instant photographic film and through practice responds to both Derrida’s aphorism ‘we owe ourselves to death’ (Athens, Still Remains, 1996) and Epstein’s 1908 British Medical Association sculptures. This research seeks to examine ‘ruination’, relating it to the human form, following conflation of ‘ruination’ and ‘living’ within a common locus. It does so by responding, through photographic practice, to Derrida’s aphorism and the imposed aesthetic of Epstein’s series of sculptures. A number of these sculptures were removed after 1935 and the remainder exist in a ‘ruined’ state on The Strand, London. Thus Epstein’s sculptures have been vulnerable to time, weathering and human interventions, which informed the research into how such vulnerabilities might be translated through photographic imagery of the human form.

In Echoes of Epstein fragility is made manifest in the medium used to produce the work – instant prototype film – and the associated process of the emulsion lift. Each image in Echoes of Epstein has its own singular identity challenging assumptions of ‘reproducibility’ so common to photography. With Bodyscape I, Bodyscape II and Weakening the Polaroid tagline of an ‘image in an instant’ is overtly rejected in favour of fraught and fragile emulsion lift methods. Individual images are taken from the surface of the original photographic acetate producing fragile translucent slices that are then resituated onto coldpressed paper and, in the Bodyscapes, joined together. The specificity of this film places limitations on the output’s scale and distils each work into a unique artefact in the absence of a negative or digital copy, with consequent ‘flaws’ accepted and expected. The frailty of the images and the uncertainty of the process signal the frailty of the subject, the human body