Peter Day


Invisible Boundaries

Abstract
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My project and dissertation Invisible Boundaries are a practical thesis, which focuses on the recording of the everyday in a practical photographic project, illustrated through images of my home and their analysis. The project Invisible Boundaries consists of 1200 images, which were taken between 1999 and 2002 and is supported by a written thesis based upon this evidence and other documentary images made by the photographers Martin Parr and Larry Sultan and archives made by Gerhardt Richter and Sol LeWitt. The practical outcome is a photographic archive that sequentially documents and records my living space by re-visiting the same locations, objects, traces and detritus over a period of three years. This resulted in two major national exhibitions at the Michael Tippet Centre, Bath Spa University 2002 and The Thelma Hulbert Gallery, Honiton 2005. Here photographs from the project Invisible Boundaries were displayed in 27 enlarged photographic images and a CD-ROM of 700 images.

My dissertation describes and explores the relationship between my various recording methods and the various evocative outcomes produced as an exhibition, where images are visually enlarged, magnified and displayed, and a CD-ROM, where implicit details are archived and revealed in greater scope and magnitude. The practical work allowed for the single image to be taken, stored and reviewed against a larger body of images that formed the archive. This practical analysis is concluded in Chapter 4, Photographic Fiction and Loss, with an overview of both the practical and written, which draws on the contexts of documentary and archival practice established in my work, where these works become an emotional and nostalgic product. Chapters 1 and 2 The Work and The Archive explore in detail the photographic collection in my work and explicitly in two major works, Gerhardt Richter’s - Atlas (2004) and Sol LeWitt’s - Autobiography (1980) two large bodies of archived photographic works.

In Chapter 3 The Domestic and Personal, Invisible Boundaries is considered alongside modern documentary practice relative to the home context through the images of Martin Parr, Nan Goldin and Larry Sultan and whose work illustrates the context of the home, its objects and identity. Both personal and objective my thesis specifically analyses the projects Signs of the Times (Parr 1992), The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (Goldin 1982) and Pictures from Home (Sultan 1989). Throughout all chapters I am interested in the continued dominance of the singular image in contemporary writing at a time when digital technology and culture are making the multiplicity of images prevalent.

Overall Invisible Boundaries is an indirect autobiographical and cumulative photographic archive which illustrates through its continuous photographic recording of the rooms, spaces and items in my home, that the tracings and residues of an existence and the banality of moments, not specific perhaps, but holistically can form an archive of historical moments, which could be said to becoming a definition of me and a history.

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Exhibitions
Thelma Hulbert Gallery, Honiton. Devon May-June 2005
The Michael Tippet Centre, Bath Spa University. May-June 2002
Web Page of Invisible Boundaries launched. March 2002- 200