We look at the work of Emilia Moisio, runner up of the LCC MA Photography prized chosen by Photoworks.
Emilia Moisio is a photographic artist whose research-based practice is guided by an interest in exploring and questioning the role and functions of images in society and our lives, and consists of distinct, concept-based photographic projects strongly focused and founded on using images as a tool to examine, analyse, develop, and articulate structured frameworks of thought. Her work critically explores the social and cultural conventions of different areas of imaging and interpretation, and investigates the persistent role of the relatively inconspicuous, historical assumptions of the inherent photographic reliability, objectivity, evidentiality, and truthfulness.
In her most recent major work ‘the grey indicates the presence’, scientific images, appropriated mainly from publications popularising science with spectacular imagery, are treated and displayed as samples. Through following a process carefully devised to selectively parallel the mentality of systematic scientific study methods, the work not only critically examines, unmasks, and deconstructs some of the remarkably hegemonic structures and visual conventions of scientific imaging practices, but simultaneously questions the scientific typological approach to structuring reality, premised on assumptions of an underlying structure organising the world.
Reversing the common production process of artificially combining multiple disparate sets of measurement data in a single frame by encoding the information with randomly assigned, case-specific bright colour ranges to generate visually captivating colourful imagery, in ‘the grey indicates the presence’ the information has been separated into individual layers free of the added artificial colour, thereby exploring communicating the notion of scientific imagery as visualised data rather than as depictions of real visual experiences. Dismantling the distinct visual language we are accustomed to associating with scientific imagery by erasing the habitually reproduced, most often arbitrary, artificially assigned visual coding renders the images ambiguous, even incomprehensible, revealing our limited ability to interpret accurately the purported information scientific imagery is ostensibly supposed to convey.
Emilia Moisio (born Helsinki, Finland 1983) is a freelance photographer and an award-winning photographic artist with an MA Photography from London College of Communication 2015 and BA (Hons.) Photography from University College Falmouth 2012.
See here for more of Emilia’s work.
