CGM Creative - PhotoArt made digital

CGM Creative - PhotoArt made digital

Just a quick micro doodle (with pencil for scale)

Sycamore seeds in pencil

Picture Histories Prints have played an immensely powerful role in our lives but will it soon end with the advent of the digital age? When  marriage or a partnership breaks down, photographs are often among the first casualties. Raking through the photo album, scissors in hand, carving ourselves an alternative history – one in which we can pretend these people never existed. To destroy photographs documenting family meals, day trips, weddings and other milestones is the ultimate act of rejection. These pictures record our lives and chart our experiences, acting as benchmarks in our relationships. Archived in albums or trapped under glass, they not only preserve memories, but they're also a sign to the rest of the world that our relationship is normal, that our family is the same as everybody else's. We display these pictures to prove we are loved and that we belong. Photographs transform our memories into something solid, something worth preserving or, for that matter, worth destroying in a fit of rage or in an act of revenge. A friend of mine recently broke up with her partner and began carrying a purse full of photographs around with her: pictures of herself, her friends and relatives, anything that documented a time before she knew her ex. Keeping these images physically close seemed to provide great comfort. Maybe she saw the pictures as assurance of her own identity, or felt that by editing the ex out of her portable archive she could deny his very existence. In her book Family Frames, Marianne Hirsch tells the story of a young Jewish girl called Yaffa who braved the holocaust by hiding photographs of her family inside her shoes, while strapping others to her brother's body. Perhaps we all use photographs in this way, as talismans – though obviously to a lesser degree than Yaffa. Maybe we keep pictures of loved ones next to our bodies, on our walls, in albums and drawers as reminders of who we are, where we come from and where we are heading. Just as paintings have visible brushstrokes and surface markings, photographs also have their own physical memory. We often scribble notes on the back of photographs – times, places, people – as a version of history in shorthand. These hand-written notes are a useful guide for future generations, as well as an aide-mémoire for ourselves. The captions survive long after we have gone, helping the family to understand their position, and helping reanimate the past without the need for personal accounts or oral histories. We often carry photographs on our person, tucked inside plastic wallets, flashed at the cashier every time we use a credit card. Sometimes these pictures are scratched on the surface and creased at the edges, but these scars can be read as part of the photograph's history. To mutilate or destroy a photograph becomes another chapter in the life story of an image. For a brief moment, while that small square of paper is in our hands, we symbolically possess the person or object in the photograph and have the power to cherish or obliterate them. The physical act of arranging pictures in the family album, covering them with a uniform gloss and showing off the results, is comforting in itself. But, with digital techniques and equipment crashing into the realm of family photography, will our physical love affair with the print soon be over?

PhotoArt made digital

Art Exhibition weekender!