Something that you’ll never really see

Garry Fabian Miller’s work is ‘camera-less’. He placed discs cut from the seed head of the Honesty Plant in a photographic enlarger. Additional discs were added one by one as the series progressed. Light was transmitted through the discs onto positive colour paper. The result was a series of coloured circles. Those were his photographs.

Eva Stenram spliced together NASA-generated images from Mars, which she downloaded from the internet. She converted these images to 35mm negatives and then left them around to gather dust, giving birth to unusual images of unfamiliar landscapes.

These were her photographs.

Roger Ballen’s work, on the other hand, is composed of a dream-like psychological riddle with objects and people — the end result is a stunning abstract visual that looks nothing like a photograph.  And that is his photograph.

Miller, Stenram and Ballen are three artist-photographers whose works are part of the travelling photography exhibition, ‘Something That I’ll Never Really See’, from the Contemporary Photography collection of Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London. The V&A is the first museum to collect and exhibit photography as an art, and today holds one of the largest collections of photographs in the world, with over 500,000 images.

There are 40 key contemporary works from the V&A’s permanent collection at the traveling exhibition and each explores photography not as a work of documentation or a representation of reality, but as a work of fine art.

Sobha Nambisan, director, National gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Bengaluru, where the exhibition is on currently, points out that photography is, in fact, a combination of fact and fiction. Even though the photographer captures a fleeting moment in reality, he can do it in a way that it doesn’t represent reality at all. “Therefore, a photograph shows you something you’ll never really see,” she explains, which is also the title of the exhibition.

This changing perspective of photographers, where they find a purpose for their craft that goes beyond the traditional function of documentation, is one reason for the rising popularity of contemporary photography, according to Martin Barnes, senior curator, Photographs, V&A. He points out that the works of contemporary photographers “have become aligned with the concerns of contemporary fine art practice, focussing on the illustration of an idea rather than on demonstration of skill or mere aesthetic pleasure.”

Contemporary photographers are “artists using photography” — they use photography’s traditional genre to express themselves freely and creatively, says Louise Shannon, Curator and Deputy Head of Contemporary Programmes, V&A. So fashion photography can blur into documentary, works of fine art can resemble scientific imaging, a documentary portrait can seem surreal, but the one thing we can be sure of, is that we’ll see something that we’ll never really see...