ABSTRACT
No wonder so many artists have begun their engagement with the act of photographing by excavating the creative capacities of the negative. In 2017, a national prize for photographic portraiture in Australia was awarded to Varga’s chromogenic photograph titled Maternal Line. Common sense and the laws of physics would suggest that the piece of film being discussed should have been completely fogged by the extended duration to light that it was made to endure. Nadar unkindly suggested that “Balzac had only to gain from his loss, since his abdominal abundances, and others, permitted him to squander his ‘specters’ without counting.” The photograph as body, the body as photograph: wherever the people look, they find photography—itself entirely dependent on an interaction of vision and touch, and of light and dark, sight and blindness—associated with an oscillation of opposing but interdependent forces.
