Still Lights Red
The first image is the simplest one in the exhibition. The picture is portrait format and depicts a solitary bottle standing on its own more or less in the middle of the picture, on what appears to be a dark shelf. The bottle is the shape of a wine bottle, but is very dark, like a silhouette against the light. You can just tell that the bottle is, in fact, a very dark red, and there is an electric stripe of red light running across the widest section of the bottle. The shelf it sits on is a complete silhouette of solid black, and the light behind the bottle is grainy and pixelated like the black and white static of an untuned television screen.
This photograph was taken looking into the light with the blind down in front of an empty red bottle on the windowsill on a very bright day. The camera has picked up and exaggerated the weave of the material in the blind to make the grainy texture and has not been able to register the light coming through the bottle seeing it primarily as a silhouette with only a hint of its true colour. The way the camera behaved as a very crude eye echoed my experience of how my vision changed during the development of my cataract. I would see colours only as silhouettes against the light, red being the only colour I could detect in the end, and felt as if I was trying to see through a grainy static of fog, very much like the background to this image. All the photographs were originally 6ins x 4ins (15cm x 10cm) and the effects have been purposely exaggerated by their enlargement.
