Double Take

A two-venue exhibition exploring the relationship between drawing and photography, taking place at Drawing Room and The Photographer’s Gallery, London.

Drawing and photography are each considered the most direct, ‘transparent’ media with which to engage with the world.  They share fascinating parallels:  the relationship to the indexical, the blank sheet of paper or surface, graphite and silver, pencil weight and aperture, the sense of an invisible ‘apparatus’ (the camera and pencil), the engagement with surface, light, negative and positive and the trace. Double Take seeks to explore the multifarious ways photography and drawing have been combined and mirrored to extend both practices into new arenas in modern and contemporary practices.

This two-part exhibition is a unique collaboration between two major, medium-specific, London institutions and provides fertile ground for an exploration of the specialism of each. Drawing Room and The Photographer’s Gallery produce exhibitions that demonstrate the primary roles that drawing, and photography, perform in recent and contemporary practice. This collaboration reveals that the manipulation of materials, whether within the confines of a medium, stretching its limit or borrowing from other media, gives artists passage to new visual languages and forms of expression.

At Drawing Room the six contemporary artists will each present serial works executed in a range of photographic media, graphite and projection. Sources are chanced upon, or obsessively collected, and each is embedded with temporality: a now dead artist’s found notations; growing mould spores; skulls; pictures of robots; press photographs from the 1920s; images of consumption self-destructing. Procedures linked to the medium of drawing - the labour of laying down repetitive marks in materials such as graphite and ink, and the manipulation of the apparatus of photography – the lens, the shutter, darkroom processes – transform these sources. The works have a physical, tactile quality that we can relate to and the clarity of line is traded for the indistinctiveness of shadow. In an era in which images proliferate, seemingly defining who we are and what we believe in, and in which the flat screen is the chief method of their insinuation into our lives, it is this connection with matter that invites engagement.