When We Were There

The project examines patterns of representation and the coerciveness of the photograph. The layering of photographs using a collage technique, unveil ways of seeing and emphasise misalignments between memory and experience.

When We Were There is a visual atlas of memory and representation. The project forms part of a creative practice project which interrogates the role of photographic representation in architecture. The atlas of memories presented of collaged works draw on what we see in the layering of representations from postcards, architectural drawings, paintings, and iconic photographs to establish how we see through a repeated representational language and coerciveness of buildings and places. These simulacra become the containers of memory, the visual cue to the unveiling and revealing of the experience of monument and place.

The Coercive Experience

In the travel and visiting of new places, how we see and record this event has been coerced. Further, as architects these preconceptions are even more elaborated in the repeated presentation of seminal works of architecture which frame our understanding and scenography of buildings.

Photographs form expectation and experience.

Through its history, the postcard has encapsulated this experience, reiterated and distributed in what Jean Baudrillard calls an ‘uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference’. The postcards commercial success and the machine of representation, has in effect become part of the aura of the place it presents. It never rains in the postcard; the sun is always shining. People are largely absent in postcards, yet our experience is met with the incessant clicking of camera buttons, navigating selfie sticks, shoving or just waiting for people to get out of the frame. Somehow though, the postcard prevails as the memento of experience, whether to be collected or sent home to the tune of ‘wish you were here’.

Postcards become a container of memory.

The panels present a perceptual series of memories of place and experiences of seeing. This encompasses what we see when visiting a particular monument, in addition to how we see – through the lens – into different buildings and places that have been shared through a collective viewpoint. These works present combined layers of postcards, personal photographs of the real experience, historical representations, original drawings from the architects that are often repeated into the first photographs of the building and are reprised, over and over, to become embedded images forming a new collective way of seeing.

When we were there.