The thin veil

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Photography was invented in the 1830s as a scientific aid, to assist with cataloguing the world’s features, both familiar and exotic, a great project whose intellectual ancestor is perhaps Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie of 1751–72. But as the 1840s advanced, some photographers desired an artistic future for the medium and naturally drew on current notions of art, its subject matter and its formal look to begin realising their yearnings, so that imitation was a conspicuous feature of the imagery. It was not until the early twentieth century that the medium successfully established its own credentials as a unique art form, building on its capacity for documenting the informalities of ordinary life, adding to Diderot’s great project in ways that he could never have imagined. The greatness of this project is judged, of course, on its completeness.

Ben Cauchi’s photographic project, however, is partially built on the medium’s essential incompleteness as a mirror of the physical world. His work constantly questions the nature of photographic truth and just how substantial images are in terms of the original subject matter. They may be real photographs materially, but how far does that reality extend as imagery? Photographs are assumed to show things as they are, but Cauchi’s work suggests they come with a veil, albeit transparent.

Two aspects of Cauchi’s work are worth considering. As a New Zealander he has inherited a national history exactly as long as the history of photography, and is well aware that the two go hand in hand. Some critics claim that the medium itself is a form of visual colonisation, and much of Cauchi’s earlier subject matter draws on objects and echoes practices from the earlier colonial period. Furthermore, he embraces authentic techniques from that period — ambrotypes especially — which hark back to a time of fervent belief in material progress and European superiority, values which in terms of the future of the planet are turning out to be rather thin veils themselves. Like many of the objects he has photographed in the past, they’re just not working.

Peter Ireland