Maria Ahmed - ‘Soft Knowledge’
This ongoing project explores the afterlife of photographs. As if floating down a digital river, photographs become immaterial fluctuations that can be grabbed, copied, rewritten, spat out and re-sent. Images live in a paradoxical state of being: empty and full at the same time, defined simultaneously by what is included and what is excluded.
These cropped, piecemeal versions of reality endure. How, and why?
I am currently the next stage of the Soft Knowledge project, a digital 'rewriting' of photographs from Anthropology and Photography 1860-1920, edited by Elizabeth Edwards, Yale, 1992. This will take the form of a book and moving images.