The Frustrating and Frustrated Edge: Thoughts on the format of my work

This short paper examines my relationship as an artist with the format of my photographic images and the decisions I make about the edges of my prints. It is presented in conjunction with and as additional to images of my photographic work. The format of my work is an integral part of my practice and it is informed by precedents from the history of both painting and photography. As a result, I have been thinking about how and why the photographic edge plays such a huge role in the conception, and hopefully the reception, of my work. available surface. This apocryphal to circular format della Sedia Contrastingly, in the history of art, the rectangular picture, whether photographic, painted or drawn, is far more common, necessitating an explanation to Raphael’s use of the atypical tondo format. Pictures are systematically surrounded and contained by the straight edges of the rectangle; they are, in one way or another,

The Frustrating and Frustrated Edge: Thoughts on the format of my work Aliki Braine 1 This short paper examines my relationship as an artist with the format of my photographic images and the decisions I make about the edges of my prints. It is presented in conjunction with and as additional to images of my photographic work. The format of my work is an integral part of my practice and it is informed by precedents from the history of both painting and photography. As a result, I have been thinking about how and why the photographic edge plays such a huge role in the conception, and hopefully the reception, of my work.

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According to legend and the subject of Johann Michael Wittmer's Raphael's First Sketch of the 'Madonna della Sedia' of 1853, the great master Raphael, being caught unexpectedly in need of a surface on which to capture the scene of a young peasant mother and her children which he stumbled upon in the campagna, was given a barrel top on which to sketch as the only available surface. This apocryphal narrative is used to explain the circular format of his Madonna della Sedia (Fig. 1). Contrastingly, in the history of art, the rectangular picture, whether photographic, painted or drawn, is far more common, necessitating an explanation to Raphael's use of the atypical tondo format. Pictures are systematically surrounded and contained by the straight edges of the rectangle; they are, in one way or another, framed. © Royal Collection Trust. https://www.rct.uk/collection/403635/raphaels-first-sketch-ofthe-madonna-della-sedia.

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Broadly speaking, my work explores the physical nature of photographic images and the debt photography owes to historical western European painting. It points to the 'object-ness' of an image that originates in a negative that has been exposed in a camera and printed in the darkroom. In a sense, the object is just a piece of photosensitive paper with a front and a back. By folding, drawing with ink, punching holes or overlaying negatives with adhesive stickers, I manipulate the pristine surface of the negative, forcing the viewer to acknowledge the photograph as an object and the image as a construct. By obscuring parts of the image, I aim to trigger a recognition of the photographic process and of its medium. At the same time, all these strategies also point to the format of my resulting images; I don't simply alert the viewer to the fact that the photograph had a format, which I have now disrupted in some way; I also create a new format all of my own making.

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Rampant and recurrent rectangularity tends to obscure the fact that other formats have co-existed with it. So much to do with vision, for example, turns out to be circular; the eye, the lens, the pupil, the field of vision. It is only when it comes to representing the visible that the format in which this is undertaken has straight edges. It is worth wondering why vision transformed into representation seems to require a change of shape. My own work tends to feature lots of circles: circular edges, the use of circular stickers, circles within squares, circular cuts, circular negatives and re-oriented circular segments of the original image.       A circular border does not just feature as a consequence of happenstance in the story of the inception of Raphael's Madonna della Sedia, the circle also frames other important histories and narratives of representation and creation. In photography, the first mass consumer point-and-shoot camera, the Kodak 1, which was launched in 1888 and was the forerunner of the celebrated brownie camera, included 100-frames of pre-loaded film which when exposed, sent to and then returned from the Kodak-Eastman factory, produced a set of circular prints. This circular trimming of the first generation of photographic snapshots, artfully cropped the inevitable peripheral distortion of early mass-produced photographic lenses. In line with the democratic possibilities of camera ownership and image creation unleashed by the Kodak 1, it also meant that amateur photographers didn't need to have to worry too much about the positioning of the camera against the straight line of the horizon; prints could be rotated to make the horizon line horizontal if the shot had been taken at a skewed angle. 1

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In my own work, the use of the circular edge is not just to do with a desire to echo this history of photography, it also hopes to remind viewers that the camera is a replica of the human eye; the edge of human vision is circular and the human eye sees upside down. In the 17 th century, the camera obscura was accepted once and for all as a mechanical replica of the human eye. 2 In my body of work entitled In the Beginning (2017), I remind the viewer that we physically see the world upside-down (Fig. 9). Like in the camera obscura, light, which reflects off the outside world, passes through the window of our cornea and the lens of our pupils and is reflected in reverse to cast an image on the back of our retina.  The images of my series In the Beginning mimic that bodily reality by printing a cut and rearranged circular section of negative upside down. These works also allude to the tradition that the act of picture-making is also akin to the act of creation and echo a Judeo-Christian tradition of biblical cosmology. In many illuminations of the middle ages and early modern periods, God's creation of the world takes place within the circular format of a disc or series of concentric circles, a belief that is beautifully recorded in Giovanni di Paolo's 1445 The Creation of the World and in earlier illustrations from the 13 th -century Bible Moralisée (Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna) and in the Nuremberg Chronicle. In this last example the illustration of the 4 th Day of Creation depicts a landscape with a river, sky, mountains and hills, upside down (Fig. 10). Other important narratives of the circle being a shape embodying and containing the act of creative creation is also alluded to in the art historical narratives of Giotto's O (Vasari 64-65) and in the enigmatic circles at the back of Rembrandt's celebrated Self Portrait with Two Circles of 1665-9.  Despite the circle being the default shape of vision, often the format containing the act of creation and used as a symbolic motif for the skill of the artist, images are systematically made within a straight-edged format. The act of making a photograph is always construed within a rectangle; the rectangle of the negative edge, of the viewfinder, of the negative holder in the darkroom. The shapes of the photosensitive paper and their frames are also rectangular. This is perhaps why I almost always insist on including the negative edge, the black rebate, in my final prints in order to acknowledge the edge of the photograph. Whilst photographs are typically constrained within straight edges for all the reasons above, there is no fixed ratio or uniformity in the shape and size of photographic edges. Indeed, photographic paper still typically comes in sizes that echo the original large format of 19 th -century glass plate photography. The ratios of camera frames, of photographic films and of photographic papers are multiple and variable. By including the negative borders in the prints of my images, I am acknowledging their edges, frames and limitations, sometimes even pushing the point home by overlapping interventions over the edges. I see my work in a direct line of historical artists from the early renaissance onwards who included trompe-l'oeil motifs in their paintings which point to this desire for their images to spill out of their frames (Fig. 11) The Frustrating and Frustrated Edge: Thoughts on the format of my work Interfaces, 45 | 2021 Where two seas meet (2018) and Folded; Lines of Desire (2018) are all made by creasing and folding the negatives before making print (Figs. 12-15). When I fold an image, it is partly a refusal to fit within its determined shape; the image spills over the edges, acknowledging the constraints of the rectangular format and, in doing so, creates fresh areas of white space within the new shape of my constructed image. The simple gesture of folding my negatives and as a consequence, allowing the image to spill outside its constraining edges, acknowledges, challenges and frustrates its format's edges.

René Descartes and Johannes
Kepler were all writing and working on the nature of sight, vision and optics in the 17 th century as was Plempius who writes the following in Ophtalmographia, published in Amsterdam (1632): "I am willing to give my life to prove that the same occurs within the eye.
[…] Colours and forms enter through the pupil, cleave through the fluids in the eye, arrive at the retina, adhere to it, and on this very membrane, make a painting. By means of this painting, the entire hemisphere that is in front of the eye is displayed onto the humble surface of the retina" (Vanagt, In Waking Hours).