《使用远摄针孔相机打鸟：短途旅游 #5》
Bird Hunting with Tele-Pinhole Camera, Excursion #5
2015
About the artists
Lam Pok Yin Jeff and Chong Ng are artists living in Shanghai and London, who work with sculptural objects, installations and performances, which deal with the ontological nature of the medium.
Their practice is heavily process-oriented, as they are interested in how narratives and meanings are generated in the making of the image.
In their works, the photographic apparatus, the act and process of photographing, as well as the circulation of images are deconstructed from within, through the creation of their own photographic devices and image-making methodologies. Obsolete technologies and everyday objects are reinvented, adapted and radicalised, and norms around photography are often taken to the extreme and absurd, until they start to fall apart, in order to search for alternative understandings of the medium beyond the picture plane.
About the work
The Untimely Apparatus of Two Amateur Photographers
The prevalence of digital cameras has made image making frictionless and photography has become more affordable and seemingly democratic than ever. However, at the same time, as the camera turns more automatic and intuitive in use, its operation and the predetermined programs within it are more concealed from the users. Cameras play an enormous part in how images are encoded with meaning. The camera is programmed to produce photographs, and every photograph is a realisation of one of the possibilities contained within the program of the camera.
As image-making processes and apparatus become more concealed, what appears to be an expansion of freedom is probably a restriction of how new narratives could be created through photography, for as long as there is no way of engaging in such criticism of technical images, we shall remain illiterate.
Thus, this project becomes an attempt to deconstruct and rethink the fundamental elements of photography through looking at the apparatus, methodologies and the image-making process through the hands of two amateur photographers. Through staged performances and elaborate processes, presupposed ideas surrounding photography are taken to the extreme until they fall apart. Obsolete technologies and everyday objects are reinvented and radicalised. The decision to use “archaic” processes and obsolete devices is not a nostalgic one, but rather a realisation that they offer the flexibility for us to elaborate on the role of the camera in the making of images. This idea is further established through the subverted use of the photographic language from camera manuals. We, the camera operators, seem to be demonstrating the correct use of the aforementioned apparatus, when actually, we are hacking these devices, violating their original uses, and making them to serve a new purpose.