Solo Show, Clare Strand Fotografie Und Video
Museum Braunschweig, German.
May-June 2009
The mysterious and fantastic productions of the British photographer Clare Strand cite various social and scientific uses of photography, and can be considered simultaneously as academic and ironic statements. Her black-and-white photographs and videos show just how much our shared cultural imagination is shaped by this medium. The wide ranging rhetorical possibilities of photographic images have long since been a central part of our visual experience: The unemotional stock-taking of the crime scene photographs often seen in newspapers, the demure objectivity of a scientific test recreated from old textbooks, or the entire spectrum of the invisible made visible - which begins with the world of medical in the x-ray and ends in the spiritualistic images claimed to represent anything from ghosts to living auras.
Clare Strand’s works play with the idea of photography as evidence and the notion that photography is an ostensibly true representation of reality. Thus she belongs to that generation of photographers who do not exhaust themselves with the accepted canon in the history of photography, but rather examine the cultural and utilitarian histories and uses of the medium. It is no coincidence that now, at the “end of the analog form of photography,” the poetic potential of the ‘everyday’ is discovered in the poor and discarded genres of this medium.