Destinerrances, 2019

Destinerrance is a term proposed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, which combines notions of destination and destiny with error or errancy. Every missive, every letter, he suggested in La Carte Postale, risks ending up in the wrong place, being misinterpreted, arriving at the wrong addressee, because it must use iterable language, and therefore the context of any given utterance can never be finally identified or exhaustively delimited. Every written letter becomes a dead letter too, gets stuck in the dead letter office, no return to sender, no addressee found, because of the inherent quality of writing to detach from its author, to circulate and continue to signify long after death. Derrida plays with the idea of the postcard – the text open, unsealed, free for all to read, yet closed, encrypted, intended for one addressee – as the emblem of writing at once always disclosive yet closed and enigmatic. Every note, every photograph, I submit, is foundationally readable yet ultimately unreadable.

Taking as a starting point a collaboration with offenders based in the Midlands, this work addresses the gaps in information, perception and representation and the profound anxieties that pervade contemporary photographic discourse, when documentary photography and questions of ethics and visibility intersect.

The artworks displayed in this gallery depict photographs of personal letters I exchanged inmates at HMP Birmingham over a period of two years. They are presented as 5×7” prints, the exact size of the official prison correspondence stationery, which inmates are obliged to use when corresponding by post . In order to conceal the contents of the letters from the public, I overexposed the original prints. Later, I bathed the darkened prints in a liquid solution over a period of two months in the hope that, by peeling away the color layers of the photographic paper, I might reveal some of the previously obscured contents. Ironically, the chemical composition of the photo paper destroys the photographs in the process, creating highly textured, tough unredable images.

My objectives with these works was explore a visual language of subtraction and obfuscation rather than revelation.

I was interested in questions such as: what does it means to show something? Is not showing or not showing in its entirely, showing anything at all? Photography for so long has been defined by a relationship with the subject it purports to represent. So what does it mean for photography if it does not identify with the its subject but its absence? Can absence be a form of activation?