This body of work is from a commission on historic European Spa towns made for The European Festival of Photography and the Digital Image in 1998. It responds to the idea of the ‘real’, looking at the idea of history as being a fiction and makes connections between this and the rhetoric of truth which exists in photography. The work is actually a conceit played out in these elitist, aspiring environments in which the central figure, the landscape painter Robert Pinnacle, made his career and found patronage.
In response to the discourse on what the digital would do to the medium of photography (to the expectation of truthful evidence) the image Names ‘proves’ the existence of this supposedly successful artist. While the work critiques the medium it also pays homage to artists who have gone before - to those who have formed our vision and of whom in that sense we are followers.
I visited eight Spa towns reconstructing the works of Robert Pinnacle using a pinhole camera because painters of that era used them as a visual aid, because the resulting image contained an exaggerated perspective and a picturesque structure appropriate to the visuality of the time and because of what its use instantly says about history. People pass before the camera but within the long time exposure fail to register just like all those people in history who are not remembered.
As the ‘follower’ I also comment on the place as myself using a more contemporary format and way of structuring the image so that it becomes more transparent. In the exhibitions works are placed according to location (Bath, Baden-Baden etc rather than by similar format or schema) in what I would call an RA style - all the works hung together - so that the proximity of the differing aesthetics raises questions about the strategies which are used within the medium of photography to support its role as teller of truths. Some of the images are intended to be viewed as single images - others as small series or triptychs etc. All works reflect upon historical and contemporary narratives.
For example, the work from the Bath section includes the piece Persons of Substance which responds to the connections between money and water and comments on who we give value to by remembering. The phrase ‘persons of substance’ was found by research in the Bath local archive and originally this meant people of wealth and status but the work changes this definition to reflect upon mortality, memory and the material.
However the work also contains very local and specific history. The central image in this series shows the head of the Romano-Celtic goddess Sulis Minerva which is now preserved in the Roman Baths Museum. When Christianity took over in Britain the Roman Temple was razed to the ground, the statue of the goddess decapitated and lost. In 1739, during a major period of redevelopment of the city as a spa, workmen dug up the head of the goddess. This created much interest and the discovery was largely instrumental in the later restoration of the Roman temple and baths. There seems to be an analogy between this story and the way hidden histories become visible - that significant images remain beneath the surface view of history and lie there always with the potential of being exposed.
The photographs are accompanied by excerpts of Robert Pinnacle’s journals which tell the artist’s story.
Some photographs and journal excerpts can be seen in the following publication:
WELLS, NEWTON, FEHILLY (eds). 2000. Shifting Horizons; Women’s Landscape Photography Now. London, New York: I.B. Taurus pp110-127.
ISBN 1 86064 635 20
Please also see my website at www.katemellor.org.uk