Catherine Rogers: Evidence and The Visible

Catherine Rogers's photographs are marked by curiosity, humour, erudition, and very strong aesthetic motivations. Her photographic practice began in the 1970s and her copious yet relatively little-known body of work is surveyed here for the first time.

 

One of her early series investigated diverse techniques established by pioneering photographers in the 19th century, resulting in an array of extremely plausible fakes. Viewers are invited to enter the game. Questions relating to a photograph's claims to truth, captions and titles which create wildly misleading inferences, all manner of incentives to doubt the evidence of our eyes...these have driven successive bodies of Catherine Rogers' work.

 

Much of her photography relates to landscape, using conventional and unconventional methods of recording and evoking the physical terrain. An epic series of seascapes glories in the splendour of the silver halide medium, accentuating the cleft of the horizon line between ocean and sky.

 

Artist and historian Helen Grace has praised Catherine Rogers' "long focus on the materiality of photography on both sides of its historical 'silver' divide. Her pinhole cameras, cyanotypes, found photography, etc, are on the 'silver' side - whereas, on the digital side she's equally a master printer. I don't know anyone who can squeeze out of a scanned negative all the values of the 'original' as well as she can".