![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Robert Barry in Frieze Magazine Other photographers who create diptychs: Counter to the trend for highly composed frames, Fowler's photography celebrates everyday accidents and the fragility of the moment Fowler's pictures present a Grammar of Living in which potential narratives are glimpsed only in ellipsis and constructed retrospectively by the beholder. We are therefore drawn into Fowler's world and become a participant in the making of meaning. In the process of looking at these pairs of images the viewer is tempted to construct relationships and forge narrative interpretations. Whilst his photographs do show us aspects of his lived experience, situations, events and surroundings, they don't tell us very much. He views the films and photographs he makes as partly autobiographical, revealing his own preferences, interests and ways of seeing. He shows us how we can create a story, or tell our own story, through combining the chance fragments as exposed by photographs.įowler is a Turner Prize nominated artist who is interested in using the medium of film (still and moving) to try to understand the world. These new narratives created by the diptychs, question photography’s reliability as a way of documenting ‘real’ life in a single, still frame. The way in which he combines the images in Two-Frame Films shows that Fowler is first and foremost a filmmaker, creating a narrative of, and an interaction between, multiple images. In most cases, the two images are paired portraits (shot with the camera in landscape format) but there are several examples of two landscape photographs creating a completed portrait arrangement with one image on top of another rather then side by side. This could be related to a particular quality of light, a compositional link, a colour or related atmosphere. In other cases, although the two images seem disassociated in terms of subject, location and viewpoint, a poetic link is discernible. Other pairs seem entirely unrelated, possibly having been taken some time apart and in different locations. Sometimes it's clear that two exposures are made in quick succession. In Fowler's half-frame photographs a variety of approaches generate pairs of images. Whereas in film, images flow together in a continuous stream so that every frame has one before and after it, a diptych of two still images enables us to explore the visual dialogue between them. ![]()
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