The photographic composite has origins in experiments by the English statistician and founder of Eugenics, Francis Galton. His layered generic portraits sought to uncover the true faces of the best and worst of Victorian society. His experiments were underpinned by a hierarchical distinction which drew upon a classical ideal of beauty, bluntly linking the degenerate Other with ugliness. Aesthetics here served an invidious ideology. Only the composite portraits were inadequate to the ideology, in their tendencies towards the average, they idealised. The strange apparitional faces created through Galton’s process, erased the very singular details and deviations from a norm, which were then being used to define the look of ‘The Criminal’, as borne out by Havelock Ellis’s famous book of that name.

While Idris Khan’s return to the composite image has not entailed portraiture (so far) it has been very reliant on the process’ distinctive aesthetic and abstracting effects. In this respect, his work shifts away from photography. Using digital processes to scan and layer a sequence or series of pictures, with some images given more emphasis than others, the resulting prints possess formal characteristics very distinct from instantaneous photographs and are more akin to the temporally accumulative qualities of drawings or paintings. Khan’s final prints have a shimmering quality often lost in reproduction, created by the subtle shifts in visual presence of the differing layers of images.

Such temporally dense pictures have a parallel in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s reflections on time, film and photography in his pictures of the lavish interiors of old movie theatres, exposed for the total duration of a film’s projection, so that the cinema screen is turned into white radiant void. If Sugimoto’s long exposures create an emptiness that counters all the energy, noise and drama of film, Khan’s composites pulse with an energy often not apparent in the source images. His work with Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typologies of industrial structures, for example, lifts out the expressive energy which otherwise remained invisible in the serial photographers’ work. Here his accumulative, condensing appropriations animate the static, neutral and inert, work against the salient characteristics of photography.

Time is made an explicit issue in his recent works, which turning back to early scientific experimentations with photography, borrow source images from photographic sequences from Eadward Muybridge’s studies in human and animal locomotion. With Muybridge’s analytic images, often provided by batteries of sequential still cameras, vision was anatomised, fragmented, broken into pieces. Any sense of movement had to be created by the viewer filling the ‘gaps’ between each sequential tableau. The temporal flow of events was fissured and fractured. With Muybridge’s motion studies one encounters a tension between the desire for scientific data and the creation of figurative imagery through the choreography of gestures with actors. The aesthetic and narrative qualities of many of his photographic sequences tend to dominate. By compositing Muybridge, Khan’s layering of a succession of discrete, static instants, results in pictures that come closer to Etienne-Jules Marey’s more abstract chronophotographs. Breaking with perspectival photographic vision, Marey’s motion studies, showed each phase of movement in the same frame, creating a two-dimensional calligraphic mapping of the body’s locomotion. Marey’s pictures prefigured both Cubism and Futurism – though Futurism is closer since Cubism primarily entailed the motility of the perceiving subject/artist in relation to static objects.

While Khan’s Muybridge images also inevitably conjure up such artistic movements, they were specifically made in relation to the paintings of Francis Bacon. The painter’s appropriations from Muybridge’s motion studies are well known. But what interested Khan was the possibility of, as he put it, “seeing if once I compressed Muybridge’s photographs I could recreate some of the strange animal sexual forms that Bacon saw in these images.” In a number of pictures from his Muybridge series, there is a violent and orgiastic accumulation and mixing of differing bodies – a dramatic heightening of the erotic fantasies with which Muybridge laced some of his motion studies. In the example shown here, taken from Muybridge’s ‘Lying on couch and turning over’, the successive phases of a singular body’s movement in space are more clearly visible. Nevertheless, a sublime dimension is given to Muybridge’s anatomy and anatomising of a humdrum daily activity. The compression shifts this event away from the literal, illustrational or descriptive. Superimposed one on the other, the sequential positions of the naked male figure as he rises from the couch, become suggestive instead less of an awakening, than the ultimate falling into death – graphically underscored by the visible weight given to the horizontal band of the stripy couch/mattress in the picture. One might also see the picture in terms of a spirit rising from the body, a link with the Victorian’s fascination with the spiritual/metaphysical possibilities of photography, it’s potential of revealing things beyond mortal sight.

Returning to photography history’s archives, compressing and condensing Muybridge’s sequences of motion studies, Khan is turning what was an analytic and scientific inquiry into an unequivocally pictorial aesthetic, replete with grand universalising ‘life and death’ themes. With its suggestion of a spirit rising from the dead, this picture also provides us with a playful emblem of Khan’s own departure from the corpse of photography itself, burdened with what the Futurist Anton Giulio Bragagli once referred to as its ‘glacial reproduction of reality’.