During the long process of repairing and reviving I was reminded of a passage from a book I have in my collection “All photographs are momento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to times relentless melt.” (Sontag, S. On Photography, London: Penguin 2002).
It is a passage that also caught the attention of artist and former Banbury Art & Design student Dr Shirley Chubb. Chubb’s work centres on the making of new images and objects in direct response to specific museum collections, creating installations in which she places her own work in dialogue with chosen museum objects.
Chubb’s most recent work One Minute was exhibited at the GOW in Newcastle upon Tyne earlier this year. The work presented sixty portraits extracted from digitally archived photographs of social and familial groups living in southern regional towns during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The work plays on the curatorial practice of using archival photographs to contextualise examples of material culture within museums. The images and the subjects themselves become the object of consideration. They are the focus of our attention, involving the viewer in an empathetic relationship with the original individuals now reinstated within our own world of experience and awareness. As for the digital interface, this allows miniscule detail to be extracted as, in Sontag’s words, ‘slices’ of fragmentary time.
Chubb gained her PhD at the University of Brighton.
