Gary Carsley
"Gary Carsley’s relationship to photography is generally assumed to be fraudulent. Paraphrasing the prosecution in the notorious Oscar Wilde Trial, ‘he is a confabulator posing as a photographer’, the body of images revealingly titled Draguerreotypes are variously Type C or Lambda monoprints that reference as much the playfulness of photography’s past as the digitilization of its future. Carsley has stated several things indicative of his general relationship to the redundancy of media categorizations in respect to image generation. He has remarked, for example: ‘I am not interested in photographs of objects or events but rather with events or things that take the form of photographs’.
Carsley references sub-cultural performance genres as models for the production of his images above the influence of other artists. Citing drag and karaoke he has elaborated upon this by quoting the etymology of the word Photo Graphia to support his assertion that he karaokes the photograph, a claim that many consider to subvert its indexical authority.
Using scanned-in, fake-wood contact adhesives the Draguerreotypes are made by overwriting the graphic component leaving intact the photo of the image. They are exclusively of parks because as he says: ‘A park is a representation of nature in much the same way as the contact adhesive is a representation of wood’. He believes this relationship allegorises that between old and new world cultures among other things. That the park, the contact adhesive and the genres of the Western cultural tradition such as landscape or intarsia are all readymades locate the Draguerreotypes among those works of art in which theory has an important position."
(Gary Carsley 2007)
