Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of the West of England, Bristol
Images of High Resolution Portraiture
This output consists of thirteen artefacts: six direct portraiture and seven subsidiary series of portraits (see portfolio). The research question addressed through these artefacts was whether offering images of human subjects would increase engagement rather than simply increasing resolution. They became a means through which to re-present and therefore interrogate the tradition of the photographic series and its documentation of the self and communities, together with the long exposure times of early photography. ‘Portraits of Glastonbury Tor’, the first installation, exhibited inside a fifteenth century barn at the Somerset Rural Life Museum, projected images onto a 20 x 10 foot screen so that the subjects appeared in a lifesize photograph that could be approached and scrutinised in detail, only for audiences to realise there were small figures moving on the distant Tor, thereby introducing a temporal element into the statis of the portrait, destabilising traditional modes of perception. The audience’s attention shifted from being within and without the portraits, conscious of their detailed lifelike realism but also that they were projections. The research was informed by developments in neuroscience concerning empathy and the biological sciences’ concern with humans’ predatory gaze.
The research continued through subsequent sets depicting other communities both local, ‘Portraits of the Working People of Somerset’, a Heritage Lottery-funded project, and international: ‘Portraits of the Arrow Tower, Beijing’. The artefacts contained within this output have been exhibited in the UK, Italy, America, China and Switzerland to over 15,000 people. Flaxton has discussed the research in four conference papers and in invited talks in the UK and abroad (see portfolio) and in an paper, ‘The Future of the Moving Image’ at the International Symposium of the Electronic Image (Sydney, 2013) and in ‘HD Aesthetics and True Digital Cinematography’ in Sean Cubitt el al (eds), Digital Light (Open Humanities Press, 2013).
