Early Photographic Work

This series of large Cibachrome Photographs made from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, focus on the collapsing of time, space and activity into the 2-dimensional picture. The camera is regarded as an active participant, being used (or ‘misused’) primarily for non-visual experiences, such as smelling, breathing, kissing, drowning, listening or burial. In the ‘Confessions’ (1994-7), the subject is asked to make a private confession to the camera over an extended, timed exposure, in the very low light of a single candle. The analogue camera only records still images (without sound or voice) during this performative process, and these exist as incidental, visual substitutes for the auditory, sensory, temporal and psychological.
In the ‘Condom Pictures’ (1997), coloured condoms are used as filters over the lens of the camera, whereas in the ‘Filter Photographs’ (1999-2002), large rolls of photographic filter material are installed in interior spaces to spatially alter areas of the camera’s vision. ‘Apple Double’ (1999), presents two photographs of an apple taken one minute apart. Aligned together in the enlarger, they are printed as one large image, theoretically including the absent minute of time which elapsed between the two exposures.

All works © Anna Mossman