In both painting and photography, there are many precedents for the inclusion of a picture-within-a-picture – a history that, without instigating my own periodic use of such a device, has doubtless influenced it. In Last Seen In 1965 (2000), for example, there is a particular reference to familiar newspaper photos of relatives of the world’s ‘disappeared’, those wives and mothers from Northern Ireland or Argentina whose men-folk have gone missing (the presumed victims of a squalid civil conflict), now evidenced and memorialised through framed portraits held up for the camera. Such evidence would be severely compromised in my own image, however, as the glazed photograph, catching the sun’s reflection, is almost completely extinguished with light, only the vaguest outline of face and shoulder remaining. Moreover, in spite of the graveyard setting, the woman holding the picture, attired in unsuitably bright red, is smiling, almost sneering, at the camera. Such ambivalence and contradiction typify my own agenda, for which the picture-within-a-picture, as a construct, possesses convenient qualities.

If Last Seen In 1965 is a double portrait, then its function is hopelessly subverted by the manner of its execution. One face is bleached beyond recognition, the other’s features largely cut off to hinder identification. This denial is a calculated affront to the spectator, a repression of the ostensive ‘realism’ of photography’s subjects (accessed through sharp focus, central framing, ‘correct’ lighting and exposure, and so on), and a foregrounding of the photograph itself as an objective presence, with all its innate features. To this end, the inclusion of a photographic print as a sizeable picture element within a succeeding image has useful potential. As a recognisably flat, two-dimensional feature, it aligns itself with the picture-plane of the photograph in which it is now included, and in turn makes the viewer aware of the planar reality of that photograph. Perhaps the flattest and most straightforward of such works is Blonde (1996), where one photograph of a woman’s face is simply placed over another, with no contextualising pictorial depth. The underlying print is largely concealed by the one above, but enough information is visible to reveal a woman whose advanced years are indicated through her deeply wrinkled features. The overlying print is the ‘same’ shot repeated immediately after the first, with a pause only to de-focus the camera and change the settings in order to overexpose the film. The resulting depiction is the virtual antithesis of its predecessor – the palely luminous, soft-focus woman now a paradigm of youth and beauty (with an uncanny resemblance to the model’s own younger self). This dominant picture, the one seen in its entirety and centrally placed, is seemingly the most deceptive as a mimetic record of its female subject, and the ‘worst’ in terms of exposure and sharpness. It is, however, just as ‘photographic’ as its ‘better’ counterpart (merely emphasising different properties). It is just as much a faithful rendition of the woman whose likeness it registers (after all, both shots are from the same position, the scene is fixed and the lighting constant), but arguably a more present construct, in that it forces an engagement with the surface modulations of the print itself (the by-products of its ‘wrongness’).

The oppositions within the two prints in Blonde have their dialectical equivalents in two other (related) works. Topsy-Turvy (2000) similarly plays with representations of age and beauty, but also opposes black-and-white with colour, and being right-way-up with being upside-down. The central part of the picture space is occupied by a framed monochrome photo of a ‘bearded’, somewhat grotesque face. The surrounding border, in full colour, incorporates a woman, gazing out at us, and proffering the portrait for our inspection. That inspection reveals that she is herself the subject of the framed picture, simply photographed upside down, her long hair forming a ‘beard’, the sag of suspended flesh and a harshly directional lighting unkindly altering her appearance. Femininity, youth and beauty are displaced by a more male, more aged and more ugly countenance, through the agency of a simple 180 degree flip – a shift given further emphasis by the ‘downgrading’ from full colour to black and white. To further compound the conundrum, the finished picture itself is flipped, so that the model, now with her hair pinned up but once again poised upside down, is seemingly upright (if a little tense), while the background features of the interior are confusingly inverted. Self-Portrait (2002) is one of several recent works made collaboratively with Jemima Stehli, as a hybrid of some of our overlapping interests. Again, a black-and-white photo (a Polaroid) is centrally positioned, stuck to a mirror in contradistinction to its coloured surround. This is a test shot for one of Jemima Stehli’s reflected nude self-portraits, made in the same studio space that is repeated in the ‘new’ picture (also shot into the same mirror and from a similar position). Just as the mechanics for shooting the original self-portrait are visible within it, so those for the second photograph are also included (the same lights and studio paraphernalia, and now the ‘new’ photographer and tripod, are reflected in the mirror, but partially blocked by the Polaroid). Although studio portraiture is the subject, the images of the two photographers/models are impaired. Jemima is observable only in a secondary and reductive (monochrome) form within the re-photographed Polaroid, or else from behind at a distance as she leaves the studio. My own reflection is partially blocked by her picture on the mirror, and I avoid eye-contact with the camera, busy looking indirectly down through the viewfinder as I take the shot. The normative face-to-face intimate encounter of photographer and model, portrait and viewer is wilfully disrupted. The final image I want to refer to is the earliest and uses a different production technique, but nevertheless shares much in common with the others. Distorted Vision (1991) depicts a woman confronting her own reflection in a wardrobe mirror. As the camera is just behind her, it is possible to observe a photograph in her hand from both in front (seen directly) and behind (seen in the mirror as a blank white rectangle). The completed picture is a double-exposure within a fixed scenario – that is, nothing changes from shot to shot, except the point at which the camera is focused within a very shallow depth of field, leaving a lot of unfocused territory between the two nominated planes. The first exposure is of the black-and-white photo in the woman’s hand – a self-portrait ripped in half, perhaps by the subject herself. In the glossy surface of the print is a second portrait, an anamorphically compressed reflection of her face as she looks towards the torn photo. For the second exposure, the camera re-focuses on her reflection in the mirror beyond. Her features are partially obscured by the double-exposure of in-focus and out-of-focus images, but we can now see that she clutches a bottle of spirits. There are, then, a series of distortions that both define and obscure her self-image – the damaged (and merely monochrome) photo, the contorted facial reflection in its surface, the mask of over-exposure and double-exposure in the mirror, and the implied befuddlement of alcohol.

All five of the works I have described can be considered as ‘anti-portraits’, in the sense that they largely refuse or subvert the conventions of the genre. But one might argue that precisely by adopting that strategy they arrive at a portrayal which may be as accurate and revealing as any other. Nevertheless, there is another purpose here – a consideration of the absent objects of the photographic image in the light of a sober awareness of the objective presence of the photographic print. The secondary photographs incorporated as picture material in each of these works serve to repeat and confirm the (literally) parallel flat actuality of the primary prints that house them. In this task, they are greatly assisted by the inclusion of a frame or white border. These edges not only signify ‘photograph’ or ‘picture’, thus prompting the observer’s reading of a flatly graphic zone, but they act as an abrupt cut or rupture across the perceived three-dimensionality of the overall picture space; forcing such illusionism into contention, while also allowing a comparative interplay between both pictures – the one which is now present and the one which was present and is now represented.