Axis — a line about which a body, Contextualizing photo-text work

Abstract

The ways in which photographs and text alter each other’s meaning and recontextualize the viewer/reader’s understanding is explored through three photographs by Helen Ford and Dave Morrel, Paul O’Neill and Jenny Holzer. Difference in language, in processing, in reference underscore the conflicting operations of viewing and reading. This conflict or struggle is seen as an inherent quality of cross-disciplinarity and is used to describe a new context for photot-text work situating it "in between" overlapping and diverging formal historical and critical discourses. Colliding the materiality of this struggling with a multiplicity of subjective positions from which it can be negotiated, "Axis..." articulates photographic and text based work as a live and shifting territory that resists being fixed by traditional boundaries of practice and theory.