Ghost Images: Photography and Trace

Laura Ayres
Sophie-Jane Brindle
Ashley Cheng
Glory Munroe
Sunsun Liu
Tannaz Saatchi
Eknoor Thind
Parumveer Walia

Photographs are often traces of our histories, memories, and stories. Like ghosts from the past, these images can haunt us, reminding us of what once was and is now different. The artists in the exhibition Ghost Images: Photography and Trace consider photographs as traces and use different strategies to activate the present. Some works make us rethink events in the past, drawing attention to issues that still need to be addressed in the now. Others rework images into an echo of a lived experience, filling us with longing for carefree moments of our childhood or addressing the void left behind by the loss of a loved one. 

Sometimes, the ghost image exists as physical evidence. A print found in an album or a shoebox then leaves an imprint in our minds and becomes a jumbled memory of a memory, an image we conjure up and alter each time we remember it. Some of the exhibiting artists address this alteration by utilizing physical interventions and treating the photographic image as a malleable object. Others make use of photographic processes and remind us that photography is a process of residues – of light and chemicals. 

The artworks in Ghost Images: Photography and Trace speak to the range of photography’s ability to be permanent and impermanent simultaneously. They make us think of images as songs stuck in our heads that we can’t escape, or as scars that altered our bodies and now have become part of us, while addressing the fact that images are also fleeting. They only momentarily exist at the tips of our fingers but are gone the next second, updated by an algorithm that, like an invisible spectre, follows us and shows us what we desire.

Capture x Emily Carr is a partnership between Capture Photography Festival and the Audain Faculty of Art at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

Read article about Ghost Images: Photography and Trace by Perrin Grauer