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Mark Ingham.
Press Release
‘Afterimages: Paramnesia’
Mark Ingham is visual artist and has been making work and researching into ideas of autobiographical memory and photographs for the last 5 years. ‘Afterimages: Paramnesia’ is the overall title of a project that will extend his work into the relationships between photographs and the construction of our autobiographical memories. The project is made up of a number of installations, each with their own individual title [i.e. Afterimages: Ships that pass], that use SLR cameras and a light source to create projection apparatuses that use transparencies from my grandfather’s collection of 5,000 photographs and are attempts to create a sense of memories being fuzzy narratives that can constantly change and be changed. This project will consist of approximately 30 camera slide projectors made by using LED light bulbs.
 Image being projected through and SLR camera
When he started to use SLR cameras as projectors he wrote, ‘In a blackened out room light from a torch shines through a slide and on through the back of a backless old camera. A transparent, fleeting image captured by this same camera many years ago projects outwards from it. A white wall intervenes, to reveal a glowing circle of dappled coloured light. The lens of the camera/projector focuses the image. Caught in this fragile world a young boy somersaults and hovers forever above an icy cold swimming pool. Another camera clicks, another photograph is taken.’ He felt that a strange loop occurred whereby what once had been captured from the world was projected back into the world using the same apparatus, and then recaptured, light being the means of both its exposure and revelation.
These projected photographic images are an exploration into experiences of remembering and forgetting. There are attempts to evoke a form of ‘paramnesia’, whereby fantasy and reality collapse to create a sense of déjà vu. Roland Barthes says at the end of Camera Lucida,
‘The photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand "it is not there," on the other "but it has indeed been"): a mad image, chafed by reality.’
A.E. Ingham and his son Stephen Ingham in the garden of 'Millington Road' c1940
Photographs are, like memories, a testament to our complex and elusive past. This idea that photography has altered our perception of the past, and even the perception of time itself, is central to this work. Photographs are seen as a living ghost of the past, here and not here at the same time, which creates a fundamental shift in the way the world is perceived and conceived. These camera projectors are an attempt to make manifest some of these ideas and will attempt to illuminate further ideas about the relationships between photographs and the construction of our autobiographical memories.
Mark Ingham is a Senior Lecturer in the Architecture, and Design Department at The University of Greenwich and is a visiting lecturer/4th Year co-ordinator on the Part Time BA (Hons) Fine Art course and is a PhD Supervisor at Wimbledon School of Art. He has just completed an AHRB funded research led PhD at Goldsmiths College, University of London entitled, Afterimages: Photographs as an External Autobiographical Memory System and a Contemporary Art Practice. He studied BA Sculpture at Chelsea School of Art and Design and went to the Slade School of Fine Art for his postgraduate studies. He was then awarded the Henry Moore Foundation Fellowship at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. He studied for a PGCE in Art and Design at the Institute of Education, London and has been a visiting lecturer in numerous art colleges for 20 years and was an education officer at the Whitechapel Art Galleryfor four years. He has exhibited widely, most recently in EPISODE at temporarycontemporary, London, which will travel to Leeds and then to Miami in 2006. Also in the Fantastic! Exhibition held in the Crypt of St. Pancreas Church, in Folkestone in The Greatest Show on Earth and has shown a film PALAVER in Lille, France.
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