IMAGE/CON/TEXT

In ‘Photography Against the Grain’ (1984), Allan Sekula wrote: ‘Against the photoessayistic promise of “life” caught by the camera, I sought to work from within a world already replete with signs.’ Treating photographs as autonomous, self-explanatory windows on the world does justice neither to the complexity of reality nor to the intricacy of our systems of representation. Given that any mode – whether photographic or text-based – is liable to suffer intrinsic inadequacies, documentary practice tends to be most productive where multiple forms of representation synergise. ‘image/con/text’ builds on this idea of complementarity. Journalistic images in particular utilise – and require – context to convey meaning. Often this means captions. But accompanying images and/or documents can also accomplish the same effect. As well as revealing the complex relationships between visual and verbal mediatisations, this also creates a layering and nesting of meaning that is increasingly employed by documentary storytellers to narrate and contextualise hidden stories.

‘image/con/text’ examines image/text relations in notable contemporary and historical projects, focussing particularly on the medium of the photobook, but also encompassing film, multimedia and the comic genre. The strategies examined bring together journalistic, artistic and activist positions, weaving fact and fiction to reveal the constellations of power in the process of representation. Photographic narrators are increasingly employing the possibilities of deliberately generated context, not least to expand the scope of the narratable.