With digital and 3D technology now the norm, can unaltered, analogue photographic prints still seduce, using only the basic perceptive trick of replicating a three-dimensional space in two dimensions? This small but well-chosen selection of photographs by Swiss-born artist Bianca Brunner pleasingly shows how they indeed can, simply by both representing and yet confusingly misrepresenting light, depth, solidity and surface.
A slightly blurry black-and-white photo of trees and sky is disrupted by a rectangular white blank shape at the bottom of the image. Is it an absence or error within the print itself or a shadowy presence in front of the camera’s lens? And are we actually looking up at trees and sky or down at their reflection in a pool of water? Elsewhere, in a series of six colour images (part of a larger body of work entitled ‘Spill’), the light reflecting off shallow pools of oil could represent either flat, psychedelic painterly abstracts or aerial views over an alien or desert landscape.
At one level, Brunner is showing us how the world can naturally appear odd or unusual, but there’s another layer of ambiguity to these images that suggests otherwise. All of the subjects and scenes photographed have in some way been constructed by the artist first. Perhaps what Brunner is really reminding us of is that technology may become increasingly sophisticated but visual magic actually takes place mainly in the mind.