Mother Tongue
When the relationship between an image and the viewer starts to break down and the threshold of what we can describe is reached we often find ideas of functional or aesthetic value. The technological advancements in image-making of the twentieth century, it can be argued, were first driven by a desire to better replicate the experience of the human eye. Only once this plateau was reached (images could be made in colour, with sufficient dynamic range) these advancements pivoted to making those images quicker and sharing them more efficiently.
When the relationship between an image and the viewer starts to break down and the threshold of what we can describe is reached we often find ideas of functional or aesthetic value. The technological advancements in image-making of the twentieth century, it can be argued, were primarily driven by a desire to better replicate the experience of the human eye. Only once this plateau had been reached (images could be made in colour, with sufficient fidelity) technological advancements shifted to making images more intuitively (and resultantly faster) and sharing them more efficiently.
Imagery based communication is an innate human language stimulated by technology; gaining its effectiveness through the ability to accurately translate something and transmit that to others. (i.e a photograph describing what someone looks like, an architectural plan describing the layout of a building, a meme expressing an internalised thought.) In situations where photographic language fails to convey something adequately through no failing of the image-maker, we may consider these as flawed acts of translation rather than inadequate images.
Mother Tongue is a collaborative research project between Alexander Missen and Robyn Underwood. It comprises visual experiments that consider the phenomenon of image-making as an act of translation rather than an act of record(ing). Assembled from archive and original images, the works consider the methods photographic language employs to describe and the areas where this breaks down.
This work is ongoing.