This is me

So I decided to start a blog…

I’m Jp Hanekom, photographer and aspiring artist. Over the last couple of years, I’ve been creating images without a clear view of where I want to take my work. That has changed over the last two months. I’ve realised that all of the work I’ve done won’t mean anything until people get to see it. So that will be the main reason for my blog. I’ll also post on some of my interests, ideas and maybe about an event or two which I enjoyed attending.

So for this first post, I’ll post my artist statement for you guys to get a better idea of what I am about. So here goes:

My interest in image making is informed by the process through which photographs are produced. In our mediated society viewers are constantly confronted with photographic images but hardly ever consider the process involved in the making of these images. Unknowingly the viewer’s understanding and experience of images are informed by the photographic process. The process then, as much as the maker, has a vast influence on the formal qualities of an image and the construction of its meaning. 

In my photographic process of image making, I use a scanner to capture my images instead of a camera. In so doing I aim to deconstruct the traditional capturing of photographic images. I construct my photographic imagery by scanning readymade photographic images as well as found objects. For me, the image created by using a scanner can be equated to the photogram created in the darkroom. Creating imagery with the scanner generates images in accordance with its own principles of construction. These principles manifest as specific formal qualities within my work: a very shallow plane of focus, reflections of light which leads to digital artefacts and dust particles sitting right on the picture plane. These formal qualities, usually eliminated from photography, becomes an important physical element crucial to my work.

My intentions with these remnants of my process are to emphasise the picture plane. In doing so the subject of the image is displaced outside of its normal context as exaggerated, illusory abstraction. These abstractions are clearly understood as different from the object it represents. I feel that this deconstruction of the traditional photographic process transforms photography into the construction and imagination of reality itself. 

The above images are from my personal section on my website. All images are for sale as limited edition prints on cotton based archival paper.

Well, that’s it for my first post.

Wish you love peace and prosperity.