Photo Journal Monday: Guy Grabowsky

@Guy Grabowsky. “Look...up in the sky...”, framed hand printed analogue C-type photographic print, 100 x 135 cm, 2017. ©Guy Grabowsky.

Photos and Text by Guy Grabowsky

Guy Grabowsky believes that to negotiate photography is to navigate what it is to be human. Whether it is via social media, propaganda, politics, pop culture, religion or advertising, we understand the world through photographic images. He utilises a hybrid and expanded field of photography and image making — manipulating the photographic print’s intrinsic surface to alter the expectations and perceptions associated with the constructs of ‘photograph' and ‘image’. Grabowsky uses his coded language of identity to pose questions, mediated through his images, around agency and personal freedom within an image-saturated world. Grabowsky’s practice thus examines our psychological and perceptual relationships to a ‘post-photographic’ and ‘hypernormalised’ modernity. 

@ Guy Grabowsky. ‘The Image’ framed C-type photograph, 180 x 250 cm, 2018. ©Guy Grabowsky.

@Guy Grabowsky. ‘Drift 1’ and ‘Drift 2’ framed hand printed silver gelatin fogged black and white photographs, 83 x 121 cm, 2015. ©Guy Grabowsky.

‘Drift 1’ and ‘Drift 2’ (2015) comprise two photographs presented as a diptych. The work is about photography’s connection to time, communicated via the materiality of the paper and content of the images. ‘Drift 1’ and ‘Drift 2’ have been printed in the black and white darkroom using expired paper which has been slowly exposed to light over its expiration – turning its white colour to silvery grey. The grey toned sheets of paper therefore signify a temporal passage of time which carries the images on them. This contemplation of time commenced in the action of capturing a live moment on film where a recording was instilled in a document; the film negative. 

@Guy Grabowsky. ‘Sapphires Lay in Broken Emeralds’, framed analogue C-type photographic print, 112 x 140 cm, 2021. ©Guy Grabowsky.

Grabowsky’s practice opposes traditional notions of photography as a tool to document reality. ‘Sapphires Lay in Broken Emeralds’ draws upon techniques derived from the improvisational practices of the 1920s Dadaists and the Surrealists’ foray into the unconscious and imagined realm by utilizing the film negative in unconventional ways. Instead of using a camera to create an image, here Grabowsky scratches, paints and engraves into the surface of the film negative to form an image, thus challenging the viewer’s perception and understanding of their relationship to visual cues and the production of images. This image of the psyche represent a projection of the subconsciousness, depicted as a ‘chaotic’, parallel time and space.

@Guy Grabowsky. ‘Untitled Red’, framed hand printed analogue C-type photograph, 142 x 99 cm, 2016. ©Guy Grabowsky.