ARTIST’S STATEMENT

The ongoing contemporary debate about photography as an art form raises interesting questions about the status of photography. For artist photographers the medium of photography is indubitably a modern art form which deals with all aspects of life. My main interest in this debate is crystallised in two ways: theoretically through my philosophical enquiries into the Aesthetics of Photography and practically through my own work, especially my abstract photography.

Because a photograph needs to be “a photograph of something”, photography as an artistic process seems to be predetermined by the existence of a particular real subject. Sometimes I accept this predetermination and try to capture the magic of mundane urban scenes, but at other times I choose to rebel and create images where the real subject is not recognisable and appears to have a new existence.

Most of my work is film based photography in an attempt to resist the digital ubiquity. Because of this rebellion my recent images seem to evade a clear categorisation. I play with inversed perspective, I avoid reference points by using close ups and I use the natural light in a particular way.

Roxana Tohaneanu-Shields