Writing about art can too often use the visual merely as a starting point from which to expound ideas and theorised ideological positions that bear little relationship to the artworks from which they are extrapolated. However, in writing about Roderick Packe’s body of work, Series One (1996), I want to avoid any such tendency toward tendentiousness. Packe’s photographs are so insistently and purely visual as to demand a direct response to what one sees and feels. But whilst basing my reflections on the immediacy and depth of the images themselves, the contemplation they provoke invites a web of allusions to and connections between such diverse things as the origins and prehistory of photography, optical science, human perception, transcendental thought and hallucinatory visions, sunsets over the sea, space travel, movie-making and modernist painting. Inevitably, my account of this will be a personal and a partial one: the work’s richness, intensity and ambiguities ensure the potential for a multiplicity of sensual and intellectual responses to the attentive and contemplative viewing it invites and deserves.

The title of this essay is drawn from a French poem, Lampelie et Daguerre by Nepomucene Lemercier, written in 1839 at the very beginning of photography’s history:

“So sunlight’s flight is cut short by the chemical snare of Daguerre. The face of a crystal, convex or concave, will reduce or enlarge every object it marks. Its fine lucid rays, through the depths of the trap, catch the aspect of things in rapid inscription. The image, imprisoned within the glass plate, preserved from all threatening contact, retains its bright life; and certain reflections breakthrough to the most distant spheres”.¹

The fleeting quality of light and the notions of lucidity and brightness alluded to here are particularly appropriate to a consideration of Packe’s inventive use of photography. But so too is the connection to photography’s origins in the work of Daguerre and others; the resonance with the spectral images, ghostly shadows and vaporous indeterminacy of early daguerreotypes and heliographs.

Balzac believed that, “just as physical objects project themselves onto the atmosphere so that it retains a spectre that the daguerreotype can fix and capture, in the same way ideas imprint themselves on the atmosphere of the spiritual world and live on in it spectrally.”² Hence, he mystically suggests, traces of ideas remain and can be discerned in ways that parallel the traces of light that live on in photographs. This invokes the notion of ‘aura’ that played a central part in the thoughts and writing of Walter Benjamin, who, in one of his diverse definitions of the concept, poignantly described aura as, “a strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be”³. Such ambiguously dialectical relationships of immediacy and duration, distance and proximity, movement and stasis, are deeply embedded in Packe’s photographs.

Contrary to the conventional notion of photography capturing and fixing the moment, both elapsing time and movement are crucial to the production of Packe’s work: these photographs don’t capture one moment but condense a whole sequence of moments into a single image – distorting, disguising and rendering ambiguous the temporal space contained in their making. They involve a further contradiction to conventional understandings of photography in relation to its indexical nature: photographs are often regarded as having a ‘subject’ that is referenced, recorded and reproduced in a direct and documentary way. But there is an abstraction in Packe’s photographs that derives from the extent to which their ‘subjects’ are progressively removed and replaced by a skein of tracks and traces of the light and time that have modified and altered them beyond indexical recognition. Since photography is nothing if not the controlled transfer of light over varying durations of time, they are to that extent photographs whose primary referent is photography itself; their ‘subject’ is the making of photographs, and the nature of this process is the catalyst that determines the outcome of the work and the appearance of the image.

Roland Barthes defined photography as a process in which the image is revealed, extracted, or expressed – “like the juice of a lemon” – by the action of light. He refers to “an emanation of the referent”, suggesting that, however long and indirect the duration of the transmission might be, seeing a photograph fundamentally involves the transfer of rays of light from its subject to its viewer’s eyes.⁴ In Packe’s photographs this is given an added intensity by the fact that their ‘subject’ is no more or less than light itself. Not only this but, in a certain sense, the photographs also make themselves. The camera is an eye that can see for itself; the task of the photographer becomes not to seize the moment or select the subject, but to manipulate the optical effects of the photographic process, to have an intuitive feeling for the effects of minute adjustments that may be invisible whilst being implemented. These photographs are not abstract in its usual sense of ‘imagined’ or ‘non-referential’: on the contrary, they are the product of a direct, physical interface with the material environment. Their investigative disruption and transformation of the familiar and everyday world might be seen to reveal the limitations of our familiar and everyday observation and perception – they create entirely new spaces, luminosities and colours by exposing and transforming the already existing spaces and light of our mundane surroundings.

The absence of apparent referents, the striations of colour, the illusory depth within an insistent flatness, the undifferentiated surface of the picture plane, the serial nature of its production: all of these aspects of Packe’s Series One invite comparison with painting (particularly, perhaps, the colourfield painting of Greenbergian modernism). Such comparisons between contemporary ‘process photography’ and abstract painting are now commonplace, but the idea of compatibility rather than a contradiction between painting and photography is not a recent one. As long ago as 1859, Louis Figuier wrote that, “the lens is an instrument like the brush, and photography is a process like painting. Whoever possesses the necessary skills and happy inspiration will be able to obtain the same effects from either one of these means of reproduction”⁵. Possible connections that might be made to painting in Packe’s work, though, are perhaps less significant than those that could be made to film-making. One of the strengths of his work is that, whilst (in the ways referred to earlier) it is fundamentally ‘about’ photography and results in static images that bear lengthy contemplation; the means of production of these images is so much about time and movement, that if one looks for reference points to the work – in terms of either its procedures of production or the resultant images – they can be found as much in film as anywhere else – from the experimental films of Stan Brakhage and Jordan Belson, to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey.

This reference to a science-fiction film, released in 1968, the year before the first moon landing and at a time when the hippie era was at its height, is perhaps more significant than it may at first seem. There was a very particular conjunction in Western culture in the late 1960’s between perceptions of the world made possible by space travel, the imaginary landscapes of science-fiction, the psychedelic visions available through the use of hallucinatory drugs, and the visual and visceral effects of the stroboscope and other aspects of the lightshows that were central to the theatricality of rock and experimental music of the time. Some of these interconnections were already well-established of course – for example, Aldous Huxley had written much earlier in The Doors of Perception⁶ about how the visions induced by mescalin and lysergic acid (LSD) could be enriched and intensified by stroboscopic lighting effects. But it was only in the late 1960’s that such images and perceptions became deeply embedded in popular culture and consciousness. There is another-worldliness and intensity in Packe’s work that relates to this very particular transformation of visual perception and image creation. It is possible to see in his images allusions to evolutionary time; their fragile, emergent construction evolves through the progressive superimposition of faint exposures to eventually form bright, colour-saturated images that resonate with a strange light like that which illuminates the earth from space. There is an intensity and psychedelic quality to many of his images that simultaneously evokes the more transitory and visionary aspects suggested by dreams and hallucinations.

There are many natural phenomena of light – dawns, sunsets, luminous mists, glimpses of clarity through a hazy blur, the twilight moment between seeing and not seeing – that are suggested by Packe’s Series One. Unpredictable happenings, chance and synchronicity are important to Packe, and by a happy accident of the kind he would enjoy, my writing of this essay coincided with my reading The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa.⁷ In it is a description of a Portuguese sunset that could easily be a reverie prompted by contemplating one of Packe’s photographs (Number 3, Number 14, Number 21, or Number 36, for example) even though they never contain any overt depiction of nature, sky or landscape:

“It’s a blue sky tinged green and tending towards light grey, and there’s a cowering mass of brownish to lifeless pink fog. An immense peace is coldly present in the abstract fall air. But in reality, there is no peace nor lack of peace, just sky, a sky with every fading colour: light blue, bluegreen, pale grey between green and blue, fuzzy hues of distant clouds that aren’t clouds, yellowishly darkened by an expiring red. And all of this is a vision between nothing and nothing, diffuse and indefinite. Towards the ocean, where the sun’s ceasing becomes increasingly final, the light dies out in a livid white that is blued by greenish cold. The panorama of the sky loudly hushes.”⁸

To return to Lemercier’s poem with which I began, light’s flight is indeed cut short by Packe’s work. Fleeting and transitory visual effects are trapped and preserved, retaining their depth, lucidity and saturated brightness in images that are quite capable of transporting a willing viewer to distant spheres.

¹ Lemercier is quoted by Walter Benjamin in the photography section of his monumental and unfinished Passagenwerk, now available in English translation as The Arcades Project [trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin], Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, 675
² Honore de Balzac, ‘Le Cousin Pons’, in ‘Oeuvres Completes’, Vol.18, again cited by Benjamin, op cit, 688
³ Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’ (1931) in Walter Benjamin, ‘Selected Writings Volume Two’ [ed. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith], Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, 518
⁴ See Roland Barthes, ‘Camera Lucida’ [trans. Richard Howard], London: Vintage, 2000, 80-81
⁵ Louis Figuier, La Photographie au Salon de 1859, Paris: 1860, 4
⁶ Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, London: Chatto & Windus, 1954
⁷ Fernado Pessoa (1888-1935) spent almost his entire life in Lisbon. He worked as a commercial translator and published little in his lifetime but wrote prolifically, ascribing his work to a number of alter egos, each with a pseudonym, a fully fleshed identity and a particular writing style, who supported and criticised each other’s work in the margins of his drafts.
⁸ From ‘A Factless Autobiography’, part of ‘The Book of Disquiet’ by Bernardo Soares (one of the pseudonymous alter egos of Pessoa, now published in English as: Fernando Pessoa, ‘The Book of Disquiet’ [ed. and trans. Richard Zenith], London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2001, 195-196