Between Black and White there’s Grey

2020 - Photography - Thomas Lake
       
Thomas Lake is a London-based multidisciplinary artist specializing in photography. He is interested in the photograph’s fundamental qualities and its role in society. This is supported and informed by a passion for conceptual art and art theory. The common thread in Lake’s work is evidently the viewer – frequently using everyday objects and settings paired with an occasional abstract aesthetic, Lake challenges his audience to question what they are looking at and how they interact with the photograph, both as a work of art and as a tool that has permeated our everyday life.

https://thomaslake.co.uk/  

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BETWEEN BLACK AND WHITE THERE’S GREY - A fundamental theory on photography

Text by Annie King

I am sitting at my parents dining room table, unable to focus at my own desk today. There is too much noise and not enough space. Physical space really does stimulate mental pastures. My laptop is open to show Thomas Lake’s website and I am gazing at the first image from his recent series ‘Between Black and White there’s Grey”. As the title suggests the image is both black and white and some bits are grey. But it’s also an optical illusion and it is also sculpture and it is also a photograph...for all the images in this series, their presence is simple. Their construction is delicate, gentle, considered and minimal. The aesthetic is so slight that I am reminded of the pickpocket who slips your watch whilst shaking your hand, so unnoticeably that later you begin to question whether you were even wearing a watch at all.

If you or I were to place everything that is considered photographic inside of a giant, conceptual centrifuge, we could separate out the elementary constituents from the noise of technological development. If you or I did this, we would most likely be left with: time, light and space. It is these three elements that Thomas embraces within the subtlety of his sculptural images, and this is what marks their accessibility - simplistic yet striking composition.

What awes me most of all is the complex rhetoric modestly obscured between the illusive shadows that seem defiant of reality. These images are documents that seek to deny the reliability of the photograph. The human brain contains loopholes of expectation. We expect reality to be a certain way and when it isn't - in the case of an optical illusion - we see things that aren’t there. For me these images play upon this concept through the absence of light - shadow. To this end the series offers a subtle commentary upon 21st century viewing for it appears that Susan Sontag’s expression “everything exists to end in a photograph” has come to fruition in society. And even more so in the light of the last few months. The bias that exists between the photographer, the lens and the shutter button is a relatively new conversation and appears during a period where larger groups of peoples are questioning the validity of factual content. When everything that we view online is a photographic representation of the thing itself, this representation is decided consciously or perhaps unconsciously by a photographer.

Within the art world photography is considered a relatively modern development, even though the oldest surviving photograph is dated to approximately 1826-7. Two hundred years is a long time and enough time for a medium to develop a reputation; or perhaps expectation is the better word. The reputation-expectation of the photographic image is one of absolute truth. The nature of the camera is precise and as a mechanical instrument the act of photographing is considered a scientific means of measuring and capturing the world exactly as is. The black and white image has a lot to answer for in the creation of this expectation. During the early 20th century photographs had become part and parcel of local, national and international reportage. Thus the black and white image became synonymous with documentarianism and by extension truth, actuality, honesty and unbiased representation. In addition to this perspective, the camera itself has historically adopted an authoritative persona - any object placed before the camera offered up subservience, i.e. the will to be photographed in whichever way the photographer wishes.

Through manipulating the light surrounding the sculptural object, Thomas’ images offer up shadows that seem discordant to our understanding of reality. This use of light, space and time subverts the historical tradition of truth within the black and white photographic image and instead overtly examines the presence of the abstract and the artificial that exist within any image. This series deeply considers and questions the longstanding validity associated with the black and white image through an exciting and distinctive sculptural-photographic medium. That is why I have titled this piece “A fundamental theory on photography”, because through the feat of such an unchallenging aesthetic, Thomas comments on the most fundamental inconsistency - truth - within the reception of photography.





Read Thomas Lake’s article on Annie King’s work HERE.