Buccal Exscriptions: Ann Hamilton’s face to face Photographs*

In his ‘Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image’, Hubert Damisch states that ‘photography is nothing other than a process of recording, a technique of inscribing, in an emulsion of silver salts, a stable image generated by a ray of light’. As Damisch further observes, such a preliminary definition of traditional photographic practices ‘neither assumes the use of a camera, nor does it imply that the image obtained is that of an object or scene from the external world’. Indeed, we know that the history of photographic techniques includes numerous examples of prints made from film that has been exposed directly to a light source – examples might include Man Ray’s rayographs or Moholy-Nagy’s photograms – in which objects are placed directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material. Figure 1. Ann Hamilton, face to face 53, 2001. Courtesy of the artist. #Ann Hamilton Studio.