Yvette Hamilton

The Appearance and Disappearance is an installation of expanded photography that depicts the constellation of what can be called the photographic. Spanning algorithmic and AI-generated images alongside the oldest paper and glass-bound historic photographic techniques, the installation looks to ideas of appearance and disappearance within images and within photography itself.

In 2019, the world's first 'photograph' of a black hole was unveiled. An image of something that supposedly could not be photographed, at a time when everything can, and is, photographed. This inspired my doctoral research entitled, Photography at the Event Horizon: The Appearance and Disappearance of a Medium which metaphorically aligns photographic processes, images, and the medium itself to the qualities of black holes, as a key metaphor for understanding material, conceptual and ontological facets of photography.

Photography at the Event Horizon uses the black hole photograph as both its origin point and locus to undertake an onto-epistemological exploration of the medium of photography through creative practice, with specific attention paid to interrogating the dominant representational contract of photography. By drawing upon my own practice-led research and the works of other contemporary artists, my research stakes a claim for photographic practice as an eloquent contributor to contemporary debates around ontologies of photography at its beginning and at its end.