Dr Megan Carnrite
The photographs presented in this submission align with the Deleuzian Fold through the embodied, interconnected processes of their making and the opaque representations of the body they offer the viewer.
Each photograph was made using the body in concert with photographic paper, both serving as active agents in the image-making process. The face, often the mouth, and the paper were intimately pressed together, with the resulting images serving as remnants of this compression and interaction.
The mouth is recognised as a threshold space, at once interior and exterior. The photographic surface, structurally akin to human skin, reciprocates contact, with both surfaces contouring to and chemically altering one another. In these exchanges, body and paper were simultaneously material, subject, and site of encounter.
What results is neither pure revelation nor pure concealment but both at once: an exact representation through indexical trace, but unfaithful to how the body is disclosed visually. The body is revealed through directness and concealed through opacity.
Time folds back on itself, too. Each photograph collapses multiple moments, the bodily exposure and the exposure to light, onto a single surface, resisting the photographic promise of a single captured instant.
These photographs are taken from a larger series. The same materials and exercises recur throughout— mouth, light, paper— but no two images are identical, embracing chance over mastery and authority. Difference emerges not despite repetition but through it, the same gesture realising something new each time.
