20 August – 17 September 2022

The Perth Centre for Photography is pleased to present No Direction Home, by Gregor MacGregor opening at 6 pm, Friday, 19 August 2022. RSVP here.

No Direction Home has been generated using photogrammetry, the process of triangulating multiple overlapping photographs to generate sub-millimetre accurate three-dimensional objects or maps. A technique that is grounded in early stereoscopic photography. The increasing accessibility of computer graphics and digital cameras has expanded the role of the photograph as two- a dimensional recording of a scene or object. Creating digital objects that preserve the original artefact and provide a more ‘real’ visual experience for the viewer.

As optical technologies become more immersive the boundaries between the natural and digital worlds blur, and they increasingly challenge our perception of the image as an object. The digitisation of objects from the natural world reflects humankind’s need to collect and catalogue such objects to preserve and retain memories, the same need that gave us museums. Through the deconstruction of digital photogrammetry, this exhibition aims to examine the creative potential that emerging optical technologies offer beyond that of empirical observation.

No Direction Home is presented as a series of four installations:

  1. After-Nature: Digital artefacts for a post-natural world.
  2. Temporal Undulations: Topography of a Meteorite.
  3. Death Mask of a Chimpanzee: Extinction.
  4. A Digital Uncanny.

They are intended to be viewed in order, taking the viewer from the traditional image-based series, emulating the photograph’s role of a visual inventory for objects, towards an increasingly digitised world of the unknown. Each installation creates an embodied experience that questions the relationship between humans and non-humans, thus challenging our dualistic relationship with the (post) natural world.

The relationship between representing the real and the elevated truth status associated with emerging lens-based technology has led to a questioning of the ontological and phenomenological status of photogrammetric representations. This exhibition is intended to examine photogrammetry through a photographic lens, as the image is originally produced from photographic data. Photogrammetry can therefore be seen as part of the expanded role of the photographic image, with digital technologies moving the photograph beyond the traditional roles of truth and reality.

Gregor MacGregor is a PhD candidate and sessional academic at Curtin University, prior to this he worked extensively in the photographic industry in London with leading photographers and digital designers. It is here that he became interested in the potential for combining emerging technologies with the photographic image, his photographic practice explores the changing role of the image as digital technology alters our perceptual experience of photography.

Currently, his research is examining the creative potential of digital photogrammetry, a process that is used for mapping surfaces by stitching multiple overlapping photographs to generate three-dimensional objects. Thus, creating a body of work that investigates how emergent (visual) representational technologies may provide new insights into the perception of an increasingly digitised world. Specifically, by generating digital artefacts for a post-natural world, examining our anthropocentric need to collect and catalogue the world around us, a world that increasingly no longer exists. Thereby questioning the role that the camera has played in creating a visual inventory, informing our perception of the environment whilst exacerbating the human/nature divide.

Gregor’s practice aims to articulate aspects of the Anthropocene in ways that sit outside of scientific and mass-mediated discourse. The photographic prints represent both the beginning of the era of the technical image (Flusser, 1985) and how digital technologies can potentially alter our perception of the photographic image from a depiction of reality into the projection of a concept.

Image © Gregor MacGregor, Sea Urchin, 2021. 100 x 100 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.