Overexposure

I presented some test pieces to my tutor when I attempted to use overexposure to simplify the landscape and at the same time make it seem otherworldly. I wanted to create a sense of looking across the River Styx, where the ferryman, Charon carries the souls of the dead across the water. I imagined myself with my camera looking across this scene. In this, my tutor made an interesting point that the riverbank is a threshold, as is the river. I hadn’t considered this before that there are layers of thresholds. I should also consider over-exposure as a concept.

In photographic terms, overexposure is the effect of too much light acting on the film of the camera sensor beyond the technical limitations of the capacity of the film or the censor to detect detail. This description might be thought of as a technical use of the word although, having said that, who is to say what the ‘perfect’ exposure might be? When an image is hugely overexposed the visible and invisible merge into one. Similar effects could be created through blurred movement were detail dissolves into streaks of light and from there to invisibility. This sense of blurring and of the invisible, or images which confuse meaning. It seems clear that overexposure goes beyond considerations of technique or technical limits. There is a human experience of ‘too much’. I think here of photographs of sunsets. A thing of wonder and beauty yet because there are countless pictures, overexposure has crushed our sense of wonder.

The Cambridge dictionary explains overexposure as a negative experience giving examples of child development being impacted by overexposure to lead or of concerns of the impacts of overexposure to violence or to the sun. I wouldn’t have considered photographic overexposure as a negative thing although the dictionary speaks of an overexposed image having to be ‘rescued’. I wonder if my project might be considered as a potential overexposure to death or if overexposure could refer to myself and putting my private thoughts on public display.

Interesting to consider the dance between artistic practice and the meaning of words, of nuance and of words and of images with multiple shades of meaning. Does this mirror the very sense of liminality which I have been chasing?