Having addressed the tumour like growth of my own digital photographs stored on my computer, numbering in their thousands from only a few years of owning a digital camera, the slightly abstract thought occurred to me that there must be in existence billions of photographs in digital format, never to be printed. What are the aesthetic criteria a photograph needs to meet to be worthy of leaving the digital domain to become a printed
photograph, an actual object?

In the late 18th century the Rev. William Gilpin laid out his ‘picturesque rules’ set around his numerous tours of the British Isles. These rules have lasted well into the present day picturesque ideals, varyingly presented in instructional books on photography, painting and drawing.

Through a variety of low tech media applied to a digital photograph I have attempted to recreate some of the landscapes Gilpin visited and ascribed in his writings as obeying his picturesque rules. By deconstructing both the scale and acutely accurate representational nature of the digital photograph and then overlaying it with diagrammatic compositional rules I
hope my work articulates the implications of digital photography through an object simultaneously extraneous and faithful to its origins.

I’m interested in a third reading, what can be achieved by applying the imagined, unseen and unintended to the accepted reality and format of the contemporary photograph.

anna@all-arts.co.uk

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