CAMERA HISTORIES is an on-going project for the artist which allows her to question the social, aesthetic and commercial value of cameras.
According to Malcolm Dickson, Curator-Director of Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, Scotland:
Typically the camera is not the subject matter of a photograph: it instead stays hidden between photographer and image. In Camera Histories, the apparatus becomes the central subject of Borda’s digital compositions, wherein found and staged photographs of cameras are manipulated and montaged to create unconventional portraits.
CAMERA HISTORIES comprises of six photographic folios
CAMERA HISTORIES is an on-going project for the artist which allows her to question the social, aesthetic and commercial value of cameras. CAMERA HISTORIES was first exhibited at Street Level Photoworks from November 18, 2013 to February 8, 2014, and included a discussion about the project chaired by Christiane Monarchi from PhotoMonitor, UK:
According to Malcolm Dickson, Curator-Director of Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, Scotland:
Typically the camera is not the subject matter of a photograph: it instead stays hidden between photographer and image. In Camera Histories, the apparatus becomes the central subject of Borda’s digital compositions, wherein found and staged photographs of cameras are manipulated and montaged to create unconventional portraits.
CAMERA HISTORIES comprises of six photographic folios
- Interrogations of a Camera
- Seeing technologies
- Cameras and Watercolour sunsets
- This is not a camera
- Camera Still Life – A Memento Mori
- Farm Tableaux- Google Streetview
- This set of work is further complemented by other optic based series including: Mise en Scene, Snow Cameras and Hunting Cameras that have been produced by Sylvia, wherein camera technologies remain central subjects of each image.
CAMERA HISTORIES is an on-going project for the artist which allows her to question the social, aesthetic and commercial value of cameras. CAMERA HISTORIES was first exhibited at Street Level Photoworks from November 18, 2013 to February 8, 2014, and included a discussion about the project chaired by Christiane Monarchi from PhotoMonitor, UK:
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Installation shots
Street Level Photoworks (2013)
Project reviews and citations:
Piper-Wright T. (2020) Between Presence and Program: The Photographic Error as Counter Culture.
In: Earnshaw R., Liggett S., Excell P., Thalmann D. (eds) Technology, Design and the Arts - Opportunities and Challenges. Springer Series on Cultural Computing. Springer, Cham. see https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-42097-0_9
NEWS MEDIA REVIEWS
“Art in Scotland TV channel feature: Sylvia Grace Borda Camera Histories – Artist interview” produced by Summerhall TV, Dec 29, 2013 http://www.artinscotland.tv/2013/sylvia-grace-borda-camera-histories/
The only thing that’s changed is everything
An essay by Rebecca Travis on Sylvia Grace Borda: Camera Histories
Feature article in the 2016 Summer edition of Scottish Society for the History of Photography
see https://web.archive.org/web/20180902212635/http://sshop.org.uk/project/rebecca-travis/
This is not a camera, stereo-viewer images, C41 digital photographs, 2013.
“The only thing that’s changed is everything”. So goes the tagline for the Apple iPhone 6S, just the latest in a long line of products released in the last decade that has categorically transformed the way in which we, as a general public, access and utilise photography. The immediacy and transportability of the camera phone and its technological leaps to equal the high definition quality previously only offered by a standalone camera has fundamentally altered our interactions both behind and in front of the lens. Smartphone adverts frequently focus upon camera quality and the ease of cataloguing and image distribution as a prime selling point, with the 6S in particular emphasising the ease in which images can be ‘taken, found and shared’ (a mantra, perhaps, for contemporary times).
The result is a society driven, fuelled, obsessed by (predominantly) digitised images, while the camera object itself has been subsumed into other multi-functional technologies, appearing physically as little more than an icon on a screen and a discreetly planted lens. While these technological progressions have lead to a democratisation of the medium, with the potential for almost anyone to achieve ‘breathtaking’ images (exemplified by another Apple ad strategy, the award-winning billboard campaign ‘Shot on an iPhone 6’) it has also lead to somewhat of a crisis in visual art photography. How can we discern the amateur from the professional? How do we determine systems of ‘value’ in photography when it has become so ubiquitous? And, crucially, what will become, what has become, of the camera object?
These questions and more are acknowledged and explored by Canadian artist Sylvia Grace Borda in Camera Histories – a suite of six bodies of work created between 2010 and 2015 that reflexively turns the subject of photography back on itself, by placing its physical apparatus front and centre. As the title suggests, the suite explores various histories of the camera object, employing traditional darkroom processes and optical devices alongside contemporary digital processes to create works that play upon nostalgia for analogue past (a sentiment seemingly mirrored by a world in which ‘retro’ filter effects and objects are increasingly sought after) while acknowledging the present, and ruminating on what the future may hold.
“The only thing that’s changed is everything”. So goes the tagline for the Apple iPhone 6S, just the latest in a long line of products released in the last decade that has categorically transformed the way in which we, as a general public, access and utilise photography. The immediacy and transportability of the camera phone and its technological leaps to equal the high definition quality previously only offered by a standalone camera has fundamentally altered our interactions both behind and in front of the lens. Smartphone adverts frequently focus upon camera quality and the ease of cataloguing and image distribution as a prime selling point, with the 6S in particular emphasising the ease in which images can be ‘taken, found and shared’ (a mantra, perhaps, for contemporary times).
The result is a society driven, fuelled, obsessed by (predominantly) digitised images, while the camera object itself has been subsumed into other multi-functional technologies, appearing physically as little more than an icon on a screen and a discreetly planted lens. While these technological progressions have lead to a democratisation of the medium, with the potential for almost anyone to achieve ‘breathtaking’ images (exemplified by another Apple ad strategy, the award-winning billboard campaign ‘Shot on an iPhone 6’) it has also lead to somewhat of a crisis in visual art photography. How can we discern the amateur from the professional? How do we determine systems of ‘value’ in photography when it has become so ubiquitous? And, crucially, what will become, what has become, of the camera object?
These questions and more are acknowledged and explored by Canadian artist Sylvia Grace Borda in Camera Histories – a suite of six bodies of work created between 2010 and 2015 that reflexively turns the subject of photography back on itself, by placing its physical apparatus front and centre. As the title suggests, the suite explores various histories of the camera object, employing traditional darkroom processes and optical devices alongside contemporary digital processes to create works that play upon nostalgia for analogue past (a sentiment seemingly mirrored by a world in which ‘retro’ filter effects and objects are increasingly sought after) while acknowledging the present, and ruminating on what the future may hold.
From the series ‘Interrogations of a Camera’, 2011-present, photograms by X-ray.
While a slip into full-blown subjective ache for the demise of physical objects would be easy, Borda treats her camera subjects with relative objectivity and coolness, in some cases even compromising their functions in order to achieve her imagery. In Interrogations of a Camera analogue models are subject to x-ray, a process that interferes with their light sensitive inner workings, in order to visualise them. The result is a series of fifteen monochrome photograms displaying the skeletal framework of camera bodies, as satisfying to regard as any technical drawing, with their minute details and elevations echoing those of architectural renderings. Printed at life scale there is a directness to the negative imagery, in which transparency is literally and figuratively key. The process is relatable, the subject obvious. The x-ray itself relates back to early photographic imaging, and yet the prints themselves are printed digitally, exemplifying Borda’s traversing of old and new, and reinforcing the attitude of practicality over nostalgia in terms of technological process.
From the series “Seeing Technologies series” 2011-2015.
Seeing Technologies offers a softer, more tactile approach, while extending the monochrome negative aesthetic of Interrogations. In the series luminous hands present optical devices (‘seeing technologies’) and display methods used in photographic process. The composition of the hands has the gentle, gestural air of those in Renaissance paintings, while the light harboured in the palms and emanating from the fingertips conjures thoughts of scientific progress and ‘the Enlightenment’. These human elements are overlaid with historical diagrams of camera mechanisms and ephemera which detail the complexities of image processing and the experimental, temperamental nature of darkroom practice.
Both Seeing Technologies and Interrogations of a Camera muse on the terms ‘negative’ and ‘positive’, with film processing reliant on the former in order to achieve the latter. And yet, in Borda’s works, the negatives stand alone. Photo negatives have become recognisable enough as an object in their own right, such that they are able to achieve their own autonomy, negating the need for a ‘positive’ and marking a shift in their status and inherent value. In the description of Seeing Technologies on her website, Borda also notes that:
From the series “Seeing Technologies series” 2011-2015.
“Metaphorically the term ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ subtly reference and question which perspective the viewer may perceive as ‘correct’ in term of one’s relationship to technology.” This question of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ looms large in photography. Analogue purists may be viewed as stubbornly out of touch, or as true ‘artists’ of the medium, while those willing to capitalize on technological advances may be lauded as forward thinking, or deemed as lacking in integrity. With so much of Borda’s focus in the Camera Histories series being centered around value, it is interesting to consider that the complex power dynamics between analogue and digital processes are in perpetual flux. As if to recognise this and rise above these somewhat futile disputes, in each of the thirty-six prints in Seeing Technologies the light is focused around the hands, reinforcing that the real power – in technology, in art – is reliant neither on analogue or digital means, but is fundamentally placed in the hands of the human creator.
The tensions between professional and amateur practice – a tension fuelled and enabled by the ubiquity of the smartphone camera, accessible user-friendly app software and the ability to widely share images with an online audience – is most explicitly explored by Borda in her series Cameras and Watercolour Sunsets (2010-present). The watercolour sunset epitomises the realm of the amateur ‘Sunday painter’, and following suit, photographs of sunsets have fulfilled the same role for lens-based media, so much so that the subject is now entrenched in cliché, mired with kitsch associations. Borda straddles both of these ‘sunset mediums’ by pulling images of amateur watercolour sunsets from online auction sites and digitally collaging them with non-professional images of retro cameras, also drawn from selling websites.
In each case Borda positions the lens of the camera over the sun in the watercolour, creating a composite image in which photography literally eclipses painting. This brings to mind the 19th century academic and painter Paul Delaroche’s now iconic claim following the invention of the daguerreotype that “from today painting is dead!” But it also promotes a more self-reflexive consideration of photography’s own precarious position. The sun has already set for the outdated camera models in Borda’s composites, and given the retraction of the physical camera object, apparatus and process, and the distance we therefore feel from the ‘act’ of taking a photograph, are we entering a domain in which the proliferation and distribution of the image eclipses the act of photography itself? The series also calls up the vaguely insidious feel of surveillance, with the camera lenses obliterating the sun and dominating the landscapes. When viewing the series, they seem to ‘stare’ directly back, unblinking, all-seeing, reflecting a world in which global surveillance from satellites to traffic cameras, to footage taken on personal devices, has become an everyday occurrence.
“Metaphorically the term ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ subtly reference and question which perspective the viewer may perceive as ‘correct’ in term of one’s relationship to technology.” This question of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ looms large in photography. Analogue purists may be viewed as stubbornly out of touch, or as true ‘artists’ of the medium, while those willing to capitalize on technological advances may be lauded as forward thinking, or deemed as lacking in integrity. With so much of Borda’s focus in the Camera Histories series being centered around value, it is interesting to consider that the complex power dynamics between analogue and digital processes are in perpetual flux. As if to recognise this and rise above these somewhat futile disputes, in each of the thirty-six prints in Seeing Technologies the light is focused around the hands, reinforcing that the real power – in technology, in art – is reliant neither on analogue or digital means, but is fundamentally placed in the hands of the human creator.
The tensions between professional and amateur practice – a tension fuelled and enabled by the ubiquity of the smartphone camera, accessible user-friendly app software and the ability to widely share images with an online audience – is most explicitly explored by Borda in her series Cameras and Watercolour Sunsets (2010-present). The watercolour sunset epitomises the realm of the amateur ‘Sunday painter’, and following suit, photographs of sunsets have fulfilled the same role for lens-based media, so much so that the subject is now entrenched in cliché, mired with kitsch associations. Borda straddles both of these ‘sunset mediums’ by pulling images of amateur watercolour sunsets from online auction sites and digitally collaging them with non-professional images of retro cameras, also drawn from selling websites.
In each case Borda positions the lens of the camera over the sun in the watercolour, creating a composite image in which photography literally eclipses painting. This brings to mind the 19th century academic and painter Paul Delaroche’s now iconic claim following the invention of the daguerreotype that “from today painting is dead!” But it also promotes a more self-reflexive consideration of photography’s own precarious position. The sun has already set for the outdated camera models in Borda’s composites, and given the retraction of the physical camera object, apparatus and process, and the distance we therefore feel from the ‘act’ of taking a photograph, are we entering a domain in which the proliferation and distribution of the image eclipses the act of photography itself? The series also calls up the vaguely insidious feel of surveillance, with the camera lenses obliterating the sun and dominating the landscapes. When viewing the series, they seem to ‘stare’ directly back, unblinking, all-seeing, reflecting a world in which global surveillance from satellites to traffic cameras, to footage taken on personal devices, has become an everyday occurrence.
From the series ‘Memento Mori’, 2013
A playful musing on the ‘death’ of photography as we once knew it can be found in Borda’s series Camera Still Life – A Memento Mori (2013). Once again the artist draws on the ready-made amateur imagery of online auction sites, collecting ‘still life’ images of cameras and photography equipment for sale. The resulting finds, paired or grouped together for display, offer a visualisation of the redundant cameras being objectified into a non-functional item, with the apparatus taking on a sculptural quality. Taken using digital cameras, the images reinforce the shift in status of analogue cameras. They have moved into the domain of creative, hobbyist items rather than essential tools. By titling the series ‘A Memento Mori’, Borda once again alludes to the art historical canon but also, more presciently, to Susan Sontag’s notion from her seminal essay collection ‘On Photography’ that “all photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.” It’s almost as if Borda, in this regard, is positioning the digital to take heed of its own vulnerability: even as it plays a part in the documentation and secondary selling of its technological ancestor, one day, it too will be outmoded.
From the series ‘Memento Mori’, 2013
This is not a camera (2013) is an evolution of the Memento Mori series which sees Borda turn the digital lens towards her own collection of film cameras, photographing them using image formats popularised by online seller galleries. The multiple perspective profile and head-on images of the camera subjects recall the criminal ‘mug-shot’ (offering a visual ‘interrogation’ of another kind to the x-rays in her earlier series). Using diptychs of adjacent images from these ‘mug-shots’, Borda creates stereo cards that can be positioned in a stereo-viewer to optically create a three-dimensional entity. It sees the ‘lifeless’ documentation images rendered as sculptural objects or artefacts to be explored, with the virtual space created echoing the ungraspable entity of the virtual marketplace.
A pursuit of a virtually explorable, three-dimensionable image is at the centre of Borda’s most recent body of works within the Camera Histories suite – Farm Tableaux Google Street View (2013-15). The series directly deals with landscape imaging and furthers Borda’s investigations into surveillance and the public and private domain by forging alliance with one of the biggest purveyors of global image distribution – a somewhat unlikely collaboration with Google Business Street view photographer, John M Lynch.
This is not a camera (2013) is an evolution of the Memento Mori series which sees Borda turn the digital lens towards her own collection of film cameras, photographing them using image formats popularised by online seller galleries. The multiple perspective profile and head-on images of the camera subjects recall the criminal ‘mug-shot’ (offering a visual ‘interrogation’ of another kind to the x-rays in her earlier series). Using diptychs of adjacent images from these ‘mug-shots’, Borda creates stereo cards that can be positioned in a stereo-viewer to optically create a three-dimensional entity. It sees the ‘lifeless’ documentation images rendered as sculptural objects or artefacts to be explored, with the virtual space created echoing the ungraspable entity of the virtual marketplace.
A pursuit of a virtually explorable, three-dimensionable image is at the centre of Borda’s most recent body of works within the Camera Histories suite – Farm Tableaux Google Street View (2013-15). The series directly deals with landscape imaging and furthers Borda’s investigations into surveillance and the public and private domain by forging alliance with one of the biggest purveyors of global image distribution – a somewhat unlikely collaboration with Google Business Street view photographer, John M Lynch.
Rondriso Farm, Farm Tableaux, Surrey, BC, Canada Sylvia Grace Borda in collaboration with Google Trusted Photographer, John M Lynch
Borda’s subject of choice – farming – may also seem an unlikely one. Borda rationalizes this shift in subject matter (Farm Tableaux is the only series within Camera Histories that does not physically image the camera itself) by seeing farming and pastoral imagery as being entrenched in romanticism, and like camera imagery, due a contemporary reassignment of value. In order to do this, Borda and Lynch set out to capture images of farmers as they go about their daily routines, using the multiple-perspective imaging available through Google photography to capture them from various perspectives in the same scene. The imagery of the farmer and their wider contextual surroundings are then uploaded and hosted through the interactive Google Street View format, allowing viewers to virtually explore beyond the initial camera frame into a three-dimensional pictorial environment. Despite its outer appearance as a fully contemporary photographic process, there are elements of the series that directly link to the medium’s history. In order to create the images, Borda requested that the subjects in the photographs stand motionless in predetermined poses for periods of up to half an hour in order to be captured by the Google cameras, a contemporary echo of early Victorian photographic portraiture in which subjects had to hold a static pose for lengthy periods.
Borda’s subject of choice – farming – may also seem an unlikely one. Borda rationalizes this shift in subject matter (Farm Tableaux is the only series within Camera Histories that does not physically image the camera itself) by seeing farming and pastoral imagery as being entrenched in romanticism, and like camera imagery, due a contemporary reassignment of value. In order to do this, Borda and Lynch set out to capture images of farmers as they go about their daily routines, using the multiple-perspective imaging available through Google photography to capture them from various perspectives in the same scene. The imagery of the farmer and their wider contextual surroundings are then uploaded and hosted through the interactive Google Street View format, allowing viewers to virtually explore beyond the initial camera frame into a three-dimensional pictorial environment. Despite its outer appearance as a fully contemporary photographic process, there are elements of the series that directly link to the medium’s history. In order to create the images, Borda requested that the subjects in the photographs stand motionless in predetermined poses for periods of up to half an hour in order to be captured by the Google cameras, a contemporary echo of early Victorian photographic portraiture in which subjects had to hold a static pose for lengthy periods.
Medomist Farm Ltd, Farm Tableaux, Surrey, BC, Canada Sylvia Grace Borda in collaboration with Google Trusted Photographer, John M Lynch
To date two strands of the Farm Tableaux works exist, the first shot in British Columbia, Canada and the second in Finland in 2015. The mundane, working nature of many of the Tableaux poses are the antithesis of the flashy, snapshot images readily dispersed via image sharing formats, distributing instead a view of ‘honest’ work. Though, as the subtitle of the Finland series ‘Mise-En-Scene’ suggests, the images, in their highly staged, almost choreographed nature are also quite the antithesis of intuitive documentary photography. The series is a prime example of Borda’s embrace of both photographic history and its contemporary potential in a technologically enabled, expanded context.
To date two strands of the Farm Tableaux works exist, the first shot in British Columbia, Canada and the second in Finland in 2015. The mundane, working nature of many of the Tableaux poses are the antithesis of the flashy, snapshot images readily dispersed via image sharing formats, distributing instead a view of ‘honest’ work. Though, as the subtitle of the Finland series ‘Mise-En-Scene’ suggests, the images, in their highly staged, almost choreographed nature are also quite the antithesis of intuitive documentary photography. The series is a prime example of Borda’s embrace of both photographic history and its contemporary potential in a technologically enabled, expanded context.
Install shot from Sylvia’s show at Street Level Photoworks: Camera Histories, November 18th 2013 to February 8th 2014, image: Iseult Timmermans.
Echoing the progression of photography itself, Borda’s Camera Histories suite evolves from monochrome (Seeing Technologies, Interrogations of a Camera), into colour; from historic, hand-drawn optical diagrams to pioneering work (the first of its kind) with Google Street View. It offers a rational look at the state of the camera object and its place in contemporary existence but (in spite of some of the titles) does not mourn its everyday loss. With her many nods to art history, to painting in particular and the tropes of sunsets, the vanitas and the pastoral, it seems pertinent to return to Delaroche’s exclamation. Because painting, of course, did not die. Artists instead sought to reinvent the medium, challenging the existing conventions that defined it and opening up an ever-expanding field. Photography is already splintered into many different genres, and unlike painting, is not necessarily being out-evolved by another medium, but by itself.
Photography, therefore, finds itself in a position of immense strength. It is a medium with increasingly fluid boundaries and, as technological progress continues, the more history, context and subgenres photography will have to draw upon and reinvent itself. Camera Histories does not seek to provide answers to the questions that define our contemporary relationship to the camera, rather it presents a fresh lens through which to see, and question those ties. The only thing changing may well be ‘everything’ and this makes artists such as Sylvia Grace Borda’s practice all the more prescient. She asks that we consider and acknowledge the past, embrace the technological means of the present and use it to ask questions of the future.
Rebecca Travis is a British writer and editor currently based in Toronto, Canada. Her reviews, interviews, and essays have been published in Canadian Art, C Magazine, Dazed Digital, Apollo Magazine, Photomonitor, Momus and Aesthetica Magazine among others. She is currently Editorial Manager of the online contemporary art magazine “this is tomorrow.”
CAMERA HISTORIES by Theresa Wilkie (2014)
Exhibition catalog essay | commissioned by Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, UK
Sylvia Grace Borda’s Camera Histories draws together a range of themes that Borda has been exploring in parallel over the last few years: themes that put the camera as artefact firmly at centre stage. Her intention for this collective artwork is directed towards scrutinising, interrogating and challenging the use, value and role of the camera both historically and in contemporary culture and, as Malcolm Dickson, Director of Street Level Photoworks has pointed out, the camera is not usually the subject matter of photography, “rather it stays hidden between photographer and image”.[i]
Although hailing from Canada, where she recently held Culture Capital Artist of Canada status, Borda’s work is prominent in the UK. She is especially well known in Scotland and Northern Ireland through her books and exhibitions dealing with modernism in East Kilbride, EK Modernism (2006) and her work documenting modernist churches in Northern Ireland, Churches: Coming to the Table (2012), where images of churches of all denominations were printed onto ceramic plates and installed at a dining table, alluding to the importance of dialogue and exchange. Borda is not afraid to experiment but continuously draws on her extensive knowledge and understanding of both art and photographic history, a characteristic which is equally apparent in her most recent work.
In This is Not a Camera, one of the six themes explored in Camera Histories, the visitor is invited to look at a series of images of cameras through a stereoscopic viewer. Using this equipment requires the spectator to consciously adjust and experiment with stance and position and gradually become accustomed to an apparatus that is rarely used in the twenty first century. In this body of work the photographer lays bare the camera through a range of perspectives and juxtapositions, drawing on the tradition of stereoscopy to present diptych image cards of film cameras from her own collection in order to transform them into 3D virtual images. This is a technology that was most popular in the second half of the nineteenth century having been launched in 1854 by The London Stereoscopic Company and by 1858 there were more than 100,000 different views available. [ii] Many of the images on sale by the company sought to bring distant countries and spectacular scenes into the living room or drew on the huge popularity of theatrical tableaux. In This is not a Camera the viewer is reminded immediately that the image is a representation and that the very notion of viewpoint is challenged; you have to work at seeing in order to experience the image in 3D, but in doing so you are rewarded with both an image with convincing depth and the “opportunity for intimacy with the camera”[iii] In calling the series This is not a Camera Borda invites comparisons with Magritte’s painting ‘The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) (La trahison des images [ceci n’est pas une pipe])’ (1929) and indeed she constantly refers to both the subject of this painting, and the ‘ready-mades’ of Marcel Duchamp throughout the exhibition.
Seeing Technologies depicts images of hands interacting with a range of different cameras. The prints appear as black and white negatives, referencing the darkroom process, and are reminiscent of the photograms and modernist graphics of El Lissitzky and László Moholy-Nagy from the 1920s. The emphasis here on the role of the negative and the positive in analogue photography draws attention to the work involved in the darkroom; notions of craft and work carried out by hands (in reality often ruined and chemically-stained) are brought to the forefront in this seeing, along with the gestural and emotional qualities of the hand. One of the images depicts a right and a left hand almost cradling a graphic image of a camera with bellows lens extended. The hands appear solarised and ghostly, trying to hold onto or protect what they are possibly losing. I am reminded here of one of Moholy-Nagy’s works, ‘Photogram’ from 1926, made without a camera.[iv] Moholy-Nagy placed his hands, a paintbrush and other objects on a sheet of light-sensitive paper and exposed them as part of his experiments with camera-less photography. The objects he chose were significant and, like Borda, he was also making a comment on art practice, in this case on the status of painting and the significance of the camera and photographic processes to early twentieth century artists. In 1839, when photography was emerging the painter Paul Delaroche is reported to have declared “from today painting is dead”[v]. Later, in the early twentieth century, the Russian Constructivists announced the death of ‘easel painting’ in favour of a concern with construction and design.[vi] Moholy-Nagy was contributing to and propagating these discussions, arguing that the artist would be freed from the old cultural forms through the camera and other technologies. Borda, in contrast, draws attention to the loss of the negative in the twenty first century while at the same time proposing, through this work, new aesthetic strategies for digital production.
Borda builds further on the references to photograms in Interrogations of a Camera where she probes the interior and exterior of analogue cameras via the use of X-rays, revealing to the viewer what is usually out of sight. Unlike the photogram the X-ray process does not use light but rather electromagnetic radiation and the striking 60cm x 60cm prints have a resemblance to an architectural or design blueprint. Like the images in Seeing Technologies, Borda is drawn to the aesthetics of constructivist and modernist techniques and layouts. She remarks “By interrogating a camera through the examination of its inner compartments, the viewer is provided with a visual narrative drawn from physical and abstract forms” [vii]
In the two series Camera and Watercolour Sunsets and Camera Still Life – A Momento Mori, Borda uses found imagery harvested from the internet, specifically sites such as eBay and other auction platforms. In Camera and Watercolour Sunsets the audience is presented with what initially appears to be a major contradiction: amateur photographs of cameras montaged onto the horizon of watercolour sunset paintings, sampled from auction sites, and proposing a strategem to be worked through. The images produced are output as a series of small photographs, thus subverting the quality of the watercolour, while the format of the photograph is contingent on the size of the film format of the camera represented. As with Seeing Technologies, the audience is asked to consider the sunset of analogue photography. Borda’s strategy here, she explains, is the notion of the “digital readymade”, drawing on the ideas of Duchamp but offering new photographic propositions consisting of “compositions of the everyday and the unexpected sitting side by side”[viii]
In Camera Still Life – A Momento Mori the viewer is drawn again to the passing of film photography by a series of images of film cameras and camera lenses which have been taken by online sellers – often carefully composed and juxtaposed in order to objectify used cameras as desirable artefacts for collectors. The notion of “momento mori” – a remembrance of the transience of life- is passed on to the camera, which then in turn becomes the subject of Borda’s artwork, Here again, the images sampled by Borda seem to reference early twentieth century modernist photography. One image for instance shows the camera from above, clearly displaying the brand name across the top, with its casing stripped off and set against a black background. This image is contrasted with a straightforward photograph of the encased back of the camera, in which the viewer can clearly see the internal workings of the apparatus. Compare this with Paul Strand’s ‘Akeley Motion Picture Camera’(1922)[ix], which depicts a close up of the film feed mechanism of a cine camera in crisp detail or Paul Outerbridge’s images of crankshafts (1923).[x] In this series Borda is questioning what it means for a film camera to be the subject of an artwork whilst its role in production is diminishing, and she states: “A camera lens of a certain vintage placed in front of a newer model of lens demonstrates a direct and fast-paced evolution, and questions the role of film cameras in a digital world”.[xi]
While much of Camera Histories is concerned with the transformation of the camera and darkroom processes and could be read as a lament, it is clear that Borda is not offering nostalgia. She approaches her subjects with a commitment to creating new representational arrangements, with the series Farm Tableaux undoubtedly the most ambitious. Borda has worked closely with Google Business Street View photographer John M. Lynch to create the first innovative artworks using this technology. Borda has had a long interest in farms and farming and their intersection with cultural practices having previously photographed apple producers in Northern Ireland. For much of 2013 she has turned her attention to the farming industry in Canada and specifically the City of Surrey in British Columbia (BC), in an attempt to address farming practices in both a non-romantic and non-judgmental way.
In the series This One’s for the Farmer produced for The Surrey Art Gallery, BC, Borda has produced aerial photographs of usually unseen agricultural formations and the work carried out by agricultural workers. Here she used a video-equipped low altitude drone to offer a renewed physically detached perspective for the artist and an unexpected visual experience for the audience.[xii] Borda sought out drone technology in order to move away from the tripod eye level usually associated with landscape photography and the negotiations around the project took three years to come to fruition. The liberation of using a drone – to be freed from being behind the camera – also had its limitations. Every location had to be demarcated and registered with Transport Canada, and the drone could be unpredictable and drift away from its GPS mapping; potentially a major problem as she was working within twenty miles of the United States border. She is continuing to develop the project with works shown as a diptych combining a durational video piece and a still image. It was screened on an IMAX-scale outdoor urban projection screen throughout Autumn 2013 in Surrey, BC. Working on such a complex project has allowed Borda to develop strong relationships with the farmers who are her subjects and therefore parallel agricultural photo projects have evolved and the series Farm Tableaux consolidates her net artworks via a presentation accessible on the Street Level Photoworks website.
In Farm Tableaux Borda extends her interest in farming in Surrey, BC by inviting the farmers already known to her to perform their work and stand motionless for up to 40 minutes in order for them to be captured by the high resolution Google cameras. She draws here on the idea of the ‘tableau vivant’ but in this case a three-dimensional variant of that concept. She refers to her processes as a “reverse engineering” of nineteenth century photographic practices citing the work of photographers such as Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901) and Oscar Rejlander (1813-1875) as her tableaux forerunners.[xiii] Henry Peach Robinson, an early proponent of photography as an art form and a member of The Linked Ring Brotherhood, was best known for his ‘staged’ photographs such as ‘Fading Away’ (1858)[xiv] and ‘Wayside Gossip’ (1882)[xv]. Robinson’s images were widely exhibited at the time and often controversial not just because they were staged, as often the technology demanded this, but also because a number of negatives were required in order to create the desired image effect. Borda however is also an alumnus of the University of British Columbia and while a student there was immersed in the work of the Vancouver School, artists such as Jeff Wall, Ken Lum, Ian Wallace, and Stan Douglas, so the notion of tableau is very much a part of her conceptual language and methodology. Like Peach Robinson’s models, each of her farmers had to look as if they were performing an everyday function and stand motionless for up to 30 or 40 minutes so it would seem as if this was a single moment.
While Google Street View uses a platform where a series of still images allow you to move from one point to another, in Farm Tableaux Borda proposes to take this further and create a dimensional photograph- a dimensional tableau. She is seeking to break away, she points out, from Sontag’s notion of the “fixed frame”[xvi]; here the viewer can move 360 degrees around the subject, up and down, forwards and backwards, gathering context. The result is a series of five tableaux- the first artworks specifically built for and embedded in Google Street View. In ‘Medomist Farm Ltd, Surrey, BC, Canada’ for example the viewer can encircle the farmer as he holds a feed receptacle getting an especially strong sense of being in a barn with 6,000 turkeys. [xvii] Following the chevrons, the viewer can make their way out of the barn, through a small anteroom and then out onto the surrounding farmland to explore. While there are specific scenes set up here by the photographer the viewer can also construct his or her own multiple tableaux. The artist herself references Felix Gonzales Torres in this respect and the notion of the ‘open multiple’[xviii] – the work that re-generates itself. It is interesting here to revisit Roland Barthes writings about the tableau. Barthes states, “The tableau (pictorial, theatrical, literary) is a pre cut-out segment with clearly defined edges, irreversible and incorruptible; everything that surrounds it is banished into nothingness, remains unnamed, while everything that it admits within its field is promoted into essence, into light, into view”[xix] Barthes is writing in 1973 and of course for Borda in 2013 using, or rather subverting, Google Street View the tableau is perhaps more slippery. It could be argued that Borda’s tableaux overflow, defying the constraints as described by Barthes, to become more precarious and unstable but nevertheless still tableaux. Perhaps in this sense she evokes Jean-Francois Chevrier’s proposal: “…using the tableau form to reactivate a thinking based on fragments, openness and contradiction, not the utopia of a comprehensive or systematic order” [xx]
For an artist working in Google Street View the issue of authorship is bound to arise; how might the artist sign their work? Borda circumvents this by embedding herself within the work –somewhere, you have to search – although in ‘Medomist Farm Ltd’ if you continue to follow the chevron arrows you will find her. The Google Street View tableau that becomes the print ‘Artist portrait, Medomist Farm Ltd, Surrey, BC, Canada’ (2013) is interesting in that it entices the viewer whilst denying them a glimpse of what the artist is seeing through her viewfinder. Even when taking full advantage of Google Street View’s 360 degrees rotation and adopting the photographer’s viewpoint it is not possible to be sure of what is being photographed. The artist herself is preoccupied with her work, recalling Michael Fried’s writings concerning the “‘magic’ of absorption” in relation to Jeff Wall’s Morning Cleaning, Mies Van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona (1999)[xxi]; the subject is completely immersed in his or her own activity and appears not to be aware of the spectator. In this respect, Borda performs herself unaware as an artistic signature, and this is especially effective in her Google Street View series when the viewer glimpses her from afar.
Bringing together the themes in this collective work is a significant undertaking by Borda, who not only offers her audience a range of ideas and contradictions, but also a fully holistic platform on which to encounter the work, each series in dialogue with each other - back and forth and back again, as it pushes persuasively at the boundaries of photography. The collective artwork (like Google Street View) embodies a numinous network; a sublime space in which photography and the camera itself are brought into question, perhaps performing themselves unaware.
Notes
[i] Dickson, Malcolm (2013) Sylvia Grace Borda, Camera Histories, Exhibition Leaflet, Glasgow: Street Level Photoworks
[ii] Holland Patricia,(1996) ‘Sweet it is to scan…’ Personal photographs and popular photography, in, Wells, Liz. ed. (1996) Photography a Critical Introduction, London: Routledge pp
[iii] Borda, Sylvia Grace (2013) Question & Answers with Christiane Monarchi of Photomonitor, Streel Level Photoworks, Glasgow November 24th 2013, available at http://www.streetlevelphotoworks.org/programme/exhibitionsandprojects/sylviagraceborda/sylviagraceborda.html
[iv]http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1987.1100.158
[v] Trachtenberg, Alan (1980) Classic Essays on Photography, New Haven Conn: Leete’s Island Books,ix
[vi] Green, Christopher (2008) The Machine, in Wilk, Christopher,(2006) Modernism designing a new world, London: V&A Publications pp 72-89
[vii] Borda, Sylvia Grace (2013) Sylvia Grace Borda, Camera Histories, Exhibition Handout, Glasgow: Street Level Photoworks
[viii] ibid
[ix] http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/search-the-collections/265353
[x] http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/13123
http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/50180
[xi] Borda, Sylvia Grace (2013) Sylvia Grace Borda, Camera Histories, Exhibition Leaflet, Glasgow: Street Level Photoworks
[xii] see http://www.sylviagborda.com/aerial-fields.html and currently on show at The Surrey Art gallery until January 6th 2014
[xiii] Sylvia Grace Borda, Video Q&A with Christiane Monarchi of Photomonitor Magazine, op.cit.
[xiv]http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/collection/photography/royalphotographicsociety/collectionitem.aspx?id=2003-5001/2/23282
[xv]http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/collection/photography/royalphotographicsociety/collectionitem.aspx?id=2003-5001/2/20024
[xvi] Sylvia Grace Borda, Video Q&A with Christiane Monarchi of Photomonitor Magazine, op.cit.
[xvii] Medomist Farm Ltd, Surrey, BC, Canada http://goo.gl/maps/1NgdN
[xviii] Sylvia Grace Borda, Video Q&A with Christiane Monarchi of Photomonitor Magazine, op.cit.
[xix] Barthes, Roland (1977) Image Music Text, London: Fontana Press, p70
[xx] Chevrier, J.F (1989) cited in Fried, Michael (2008) Why Photography Matters in Art as Never Before, New Haven: Yale University Press
[xxi] Fried, Michael, cited in Van Gelder, H. (2009) ‘The Shape of the Pictorial in Contemporary Photography’ in Image [&] Narrative, Images of the Invisible, Vol. X, issue 1 (24) accessed online 1/12/2013
Exhibition catalog essay | commissioned by Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, UK
Sylvia Grace Borda’s Camera Histories draws together a range of themes that Borda has been exploring in parallel over the last few years: themes that put the camera as artefact firmly at centre stage. Her intention for this collective artwork is directed towards scrutinising, interrogating and challenging the use, value and role of the camera both historically and in contemporary culture and, as Malcolm Dickson, Director of Street Level Photoworks has pointed out, the camera is not usually the subject matter of photography, “rather it stays hidden between photographer and image”.[i]
Although hailing from Canada, where she recently held Culture Capital Artist of Canada status, Borda’s work is prominent in the UK. She is especially well known in Scotland and Northern Ireland through her books and exhibitions dealing with modernism in East Kilbride, EK Modernism (2006) and her work documenting modernist churches in Northern Ireland, Churches: Coming to the Table (2012), where images of churches of all denominations were printed onto ceramic plates and installed at a dining table, alluding to the importance of dialogue and exchange. Borda is not afraid to experiment but continuously draws on her extensive knowledge and understanding of both art and photographic history, a characteristic which is equally apparent in her most recent work.
In This is Not a Camera, one of the six themes explored in Camera Histories, the visitor is invited to look at a series of images of cameras through a stereoscopic viewer. Using this equipment requires the spectator to consciously adjust and experiment with stance and position and gradually become accustomed to an apparatus that is rarely used in the twenty first century. In this body of work the photographer lays bare the camera through a range of perspectives and juxtapositions, drawing on the tradition of stereoscopy to present diptych image cards of film cameras from her own collection in order to transform them into 3D virtual images. This is a technology that was most popular in the second half of the nineteenth century having been launched in 1854 by The London Stereoscopic Company and by 1858 there were more than 100,000 different views available. [ii] Many of the images on sale by the company sought to bring distant countries and spectacular scenes into the living room or drew on the huge popularity of theatrical tableaux. In This is not a Camera the viewer is reminded immediately that the image is a representation and that the very notion of viewpoint is challenged; you have to work at seeing in order to experience the image in 3D, but in doing so you are rewarded with both an image with convincing depth and the “opportunity for intimacy with the camera”[iii] In calling the series This is not a Camera Borda invites comparisons with Magritte’s painting ‘The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) (La trahison des images [ceci n’est pas une pipe])’ (1929) and indeed she constantly refers to both the subject of this painting, and the ‘ready-mades’ of Marcel Duchamp throughout the exhibition.
Seeing Technologies depicts images of hands interacting with a range of different cameras. The prints appear as black and white negatives, referencing the darkroom process, and are reminiscent of the photograms and modernist graphics of El Lissitzky and László Moholy-Nagy from the 1920s. The emphasis here on the role of the negative and the positive in analogue photography draws attention to the work involved in the darkroom; notions of craft and work carried out by hands (in reality often ruined and chemically-stained) are brought to the forefront in this seeing, along with the gestural and emotional qualities of the hand. One of the images depicts a right and a left hand almost cradling a graphic image of a camera with bellows lens extended. The hands appear solarised and ghostly, trying to hold onto or protect what they are possibly losing. I am reminded here of one of Moholy-Nagy’s works, ‘Photogram’ from 1926, made without a camera.[iv] Moholy-Nagy placed his hands, a paintbrush and other objects on a sheet of light-sensitive paper and exposed them as part of his experiments with camera-less photography. The objects he chose were significant and, like Borda, he was also making a comment on art practice, in this case on the status of painting and the significance of the camera and photographic processes to early twentieth century artists. In 1839, when photography was emerging the painter Paul Delaroche is reported to have declared “from today painting is dead”[v]. Later, in the early twentieth century, the Russian Constructivists announced the death of ‘easel painting’ in favour of a concern with construction and design.[vi] Moholy-Nagy was contributing to and propagating these discussions, arguing that the artist would be freed from the old cultural forms through the camera and other technologies. Borda, in contrast, draws attention to the loss of the negative in the twenty first century while at the same time proposing, through this work, new aesthetic strategies for digital production.
Borda builds further on the references to photograms in Interrogations of a Camera where she probes the interior and exterior of analogue cameras via the use of X-rays, revealing to the viewer what is usually out of sight. Unlike the photogram the X-ray process does not use light but rather electromagnetic radiation and the striking 60cm x 60cm prints have a resemblance to an architectural or design blueprint. Like the images in Seeing Technologies, Borda is drawn to the aesthetics of constructivist and modernist techniques and layouts. She remarks “By interrogating a camera through the examination of its inner compartments, the viewer is provided with a visual narrative drawn from physical and abstract forms” [vii]
In the two series Camera and Watercolour Sunsets and Camera Still Life – A Momento Mori, Borda uses found imagery harvested from the internet, specifically sites such as eBay and other auction platforms. In Camera and Watercolour Sunsets the audience is presented with what initially appears to be a major contradiction: amateur photographs of cameras montaged onto the horizon of watercolour sunset paintings, sampled from auction sites, and proposing a strategem to be worked through. The images produced are output as a series of small photographs, thus subverting the quality of the watercolour, while the format of the photograph is contingent on the size of the film format of the camera represented. As with Seeing Technologies, the audience is asked to consider the sunset of analogue photography. Borda’s strategy here, she explains, is the notion of the “digital readymade”, drawing on the ideas of Duchamp but offering new photographic propositions consisting of “compositions of the everyday and the unexpected sitting side by side”[viii]
In Camera Still Life – A Momento Mori the viewer is drawn again to the passing of film photography by a series of images of film cameras and camera lenses which have been taken by online sellers – often carefully composed and juxtaposed in order to objectify used cameras as desirable artefacts for collectors. The notion of “momento mori” – a remembrance of the transience of life- is passed on to the camera, which then in turn becomes the subject of Borda’s artwork, Here again, the images sampled by Borda seem to reference early twentieth century modernist photography. One image for instance shows the camera from above, clearly displaying the brand name across the top, with its casing stripped off and set against a black background. This image is contrasted with a straightforward photograph of the encased back of the camera, in which the viewer can clearly see the internal workings of the apparatus. Compare this with Paul Strand’s ‘Akeley Motion Picture Camera’(1922)[ix], which depicts a close up of the film feed mechanism of a cine camera in crisp detail or Paul Outerbridge’s images of crankshafts (1923).[x] In this series Borda is questioning what it means for a film camera to be the subject of an artwork whilst its role in production is diminishing, and she states: “A camera lens of a certain vintage placed in front of a newer model of lens demonstrates a direct and fast-paced evolution, and questions the role of film cameras in a digital world”.[xi]
While much of Camera Histories is concerned with the transformation of the camera and darkroom processes and could be read as a lament, it is clear that Borda is not offering nostalgia. She approaches her subjects with a commitment to creating new representational arrangements, with the series Farm Tableaux undoubtedly the most ambitious. Borda has worked closely with Google Business Street View photographer John M. Lynch to create the first innovative artworks using this technology. Borda has had a long interest in farms and farming and their intersection with cultural practices having previously photographed apple producers in Northern Ireland. For much of 2013 she has turned her attention to the farming industry in Canada and specifically the City of Surrey in British Columbia (BC), in an attempt to address farming practices in both a non-romantic and non-judgmental way.
In the series This One’s for the Farmer produced for The Surrey Art Gallery, BC, Borda has produced aerial photographs of usually unseen agricultural formations and the work carried out by agricultural workers. Here she used a video-equipped low altitude drone to offer a renewed physically detached perspective for the artist and an unexpected visual experience for the audience.[xii] Borda sought out drone technology in order to move away from the tripod eye level usually associated with landscape photography and the negotiations around the project took three years to come to fruition. The liberation of using a drone – to be freed from being behind the camera – also had its limitations. Every location had to be demarcated and registered with Transport Canada, and the drone could be unpredictable and drift away from its GPS mapping; potentially a major problem as she was working within twenty miles of the United States border. She is continuing to develop the project with works shown as a diptych combining a durational video piece and a still image. It was screened on an IMAX-scale outdoor urban projection screen throughout Autumn 2013 in Surrey, BC. Working on such a complex project has allowed Borda to develop strong relationships with the farmers who are her subjects and therefore parallel agricultural photo projects have evolved and the series Farm Tableaux consolidates her net artworks via a presentation accessible on the Street Level Photoworks website.
In Farm Tableaux Borda extends her interest in farming in Surrey, BC by inviting the farmers already known to her to perform their work and stand motionless for up to 40 minutes in order for them to be captured by the high resolution Google cameras. She draws here on the idea of the ‘tableau vivant’ but in this case a three-dimensional variant of that concept. She refers to her processes as a “reverse engineering” of nineteenth century photographic practices citing the work of photographers such as Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901) and Oscar Rejlander (1813-1875) as her tableaux forerunners.[xiii] Henry Peach Robinson, an early proponent of photography as an art form and a member of The Linked Ring Brotherhood, was best known for his ‘staged’ photographs such as ‘Fading Away’ (1858)[xiv] and ‘Wayside Gossip’ (1882)[xv]. Robinson’s images were widely exhibited at the time and often controversial not just because they were staged, as often the technology demanded this, but also because a number of negatives were required in order to create the desired image effect. Borda however is also an alumnus of the University of British Columbia and while a student there was immersed in the work of the Vancouver School, artists such as Jeff Wall, Ken Lum, Ian Wallace, and Stan Douglas, so the notion of tableau is very much a part of her conceptual language and methodology. Like Peach Robinson’s models, each of her farmers had to look as if they were performing an everyday function and stand motionless for up to 30 or 40 minutes so it would seem as if this was a single moment.
While Google Street View uses a platform where a series of still images allow you to move from one point to another, in Farm Tableaux Borda proposes to take this further and create a dimensional photograph- a dimensional tableau. She is seeking to break away, she points out, from Sontag’s notion of the “fixed frame”[xvi]; here the viewer can move 360 degrees around the subject, up and down, forwards and backwards, gathering context. The result is a series of five tableaux- the first artworks specifically built for and embedded in Google Street View. In ‘Medomist Farm Ltd, Surrey, BC, Canada’ for example the viewer can encircle the farmer as he holds a feed receptacle getting an especially strong sense of being in a barn with 6,000 turkeys. [xvii] Following the chevrons, the viewer can make their way out of the barn, through a small anteroom and then out onto the surrounding farmland to explore. While there are specific scenes set up here by the photographer the viewer can also construct his or her own multiple tableaux. The artist herself references Felix Gonzales Torres in this respect and the notion of the ‘open multiple’[xviii] – the work that re-generates itself. It is interesting here to revisit Roland Barthes writings about the tableau. Barthes states, “The tableau (pictorial, theatrical, literary) is a pre cut-out segment with clearly defined edges, irreversible and incorruptible; everything that surrounds it is banished into nothingness, remains unnamed, while everything that it admits within its field is promoted into essence, into light, into view”[xix] Barthes is writing in 1973 and of course for Borda in 2013 using, or rather subverting, Google Street View the tableau is perhaps more slippery. It could be argued that Borda’s tableaux overflow, defying the constraints as described by Barthes, to become more precarious and unstable but nevertheless still tableaux. Perhaps in this sense she evokes Jean-Francois Chevrier’s proposal: “…using the tableau form to reactivate a thinking based on fragments, openness and contradiction, not the utopia of a comprehensive or systematic order” [xx]
For an artist working in Google Street View the issue of authorship is bound to arise; how might the artist sign their work? Borda circumvents this by embedding herself within the work –somewhere, you have to search – although in ‘Medomist Farm Ltd’ if you continue to follow the chevron arrows you will find her. The Google Street View tableau that becomes the print ‘Artist portrait, Medomist Farm Ltd, Surrey, BC, Canada’ (2013) is interesting in that it entices the viewer whilst denying them a glimpse of what the artist is seeing through her viewfinder. Even when taking full advantage of Google Street View’s 360 degrees rotation and adopting the photographer’s viewpoint it is not possible to be sure of what is being photographed. The artist herself is preoccupied with her work, recalling Michael Fried’s writings concerning the “‘magic’ of absorption” in relation to Jeff Wall’s Morning Cleaning, Mies Van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona (1999)[xxi]; the subject is completely immersed in his or her own activity and appears not to be aware of the spectator. In this respect, Borda performs herself unaware as an artistic signature, and this is especially effective in her Google Street View series when the viewer glimpses her from afar.
Bringing together the themes in this collective work is a significant undertaking by Borda, who not only offers her audience a range of ideas and contradictions, but also a fully holistic platform on which to encounter the work, each series in dialogue with each other - back and forth and back again, as it pushes persuasively at the boundaries of photography. The collective artwork (like Google Street View) embodies a numinous network; a sublime space in which photography and the camera itself are brought into question, perhaps performing themselves unaware.
Notes
[i] Dickson, Malcolm (2013) Sylvia Grace Borda, Camera Histories, Exhibition Leaflet, Glasgow: Street Level Photoworks
[ii] Holland Patricia,(1996) ‘Sweet it is to scan…’ Personal photographs and popular photography, in, Wells, Liz. ed. (1996) Photography a Critical Introduction, London: Routledge pp
[iii] Borda, Sylvia Grace (2013) Question & Answers with Christiane Monarchi of Photomonitor, Streel Level Photoworks, Glasgow November 24th 2013, available at http://www.streetlevelphotoworks.org/programme/exhibitionsandprojects/sylviagraceborda/sylviagraceborda.html
[iv]http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1987.1100.158
[v] Trachtenberg, Alan (1980) Classic Essays on Photography, New Haven Conn: Leete’s Island Books,ix
[vi] Green, Christopher (2008) The Machine, in Wilk, Christopher,(2006) Modernism designing a new world, London: V&A Publications pp 72-89
[vii] Borda, Sylvia Grace (2013) Sylvia Grace Borda, Camera Histories, Exhibition Handout, Glasgow: Street Level Photoworks
[viii] ibid
[ix] http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/search-the-collections/265353
[x] http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/13123
http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/50180
[xi] Borda, Sylvia Grace (2013) Sylvia Grace Borda, Camera Histories, Exhibition Leaflet, Glasgow: Street Level Photoworks
[xii] see http://www.sylviagborda.com/aerial-fields.html and currently on show at The Surrey Art gallery until January 6th 2014
[xiii] Sylvia Grace Borda, Video Q&A with Christiane Monarchi of Photomonitor Magazine, op.cit.
[xiv]http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/collection/photography/royalphotographicsociety/collectionitem.aspx?id=2003-5001/2/23282
[xv]http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/collection/photography/royalphotographicsociety/collectionitem.aspx?id=2003-5001/2/20024
[xvi] Sylvia Grace Borda, Video Q&A with Christiane Monarchi of Photomonitor Magazine, op.cit.
[xvii] Medomist Farm Ltd, Surrey, BC, Canada http://goo.gl/maps/1NgdN
[xviii] Sylvia Grace Borda, Video Q&A with Christiane Monarchi of Photomonitor Magazine, op.cit.
[xix] Barthes, Roland (1977) Image Music Text, London: Fontana Press, p70
[xx] Chevrier, J.F (1989) cited in Fried, Michael (2008) Why Photography Matters in Art as Never Before, New Haven: Yale University Press
[xxi] Fried, Michael, cited in Van Gelder, H. (2009) ‘The Shape of the Pictorial in Contemporary Photography’ in Image [&] Narrative, Images of the Invisible, Vol. X, issue 1 (24) accessed online 1/12/2013