MORGAN FISHER – PAST PRESENT, PRESENT PAST
2014-12-29My father taught me photography in 1955, when I was twelve years old. I made my first movies (they were conventional home movies) with a Brownie 8mm camera in 1956. I believed that photography and film as I found them in the 1950s would last forever.
M.F
All of the works in this exhibition were made as photographs or films. I didn’t do this to sustain my belief, it was the way I wanted to do things, and they were easy and normal things to do. But in treating some of the works after their original production I have chosen to work digitally because it is simpler.
The photographs of unused boxes of still film from the 1950s, shot recently, express the pathos of how I thought about photography and film those many years ago. Most of the manufacturers have disappeared or have stopped making film. At the time these objects were made they carried the promise of future use. Now, their expiration dates long past, they are useless, at least with respect to their original purpose, their uselessness underlined by the fact that photography on film as an amateur practice is essentially extinct. The photographs were shot on film, a practice still current in commercial photography, but scanned and then printed as archival pigment prints.
Opposite – Agfacolor Negativfilm K 24 x 36 mm August 1955, 2014
Exhibition runs through till January 25th, 2015
Maureen Paley
21 Herald Street
E2 6JT
London
