Amy Blakemore

In his seminal theorization of photography, Camera Lucida (1980), Roland Barthes isolated an intractable "truth" of the photograph, namely, that its temporality is not grounded in the present tense but in the future anterior of that which will have been. This means that every presence captured by a photograph already implies its absence too. Amy Blakemore’s small-scale photographs, with their evocation of memory and longing, amplify such a conceit, through both their technical peculiarities and their hauntingly ephemeral subjects…

“Cameras lend purpose to being in the public and make observation/exploration acceptable. Instead of picking up stuff, I leave with a flat and squared off record of things and people in space, how they interact and stand in relationship to one another.”

Artist gallery