Retrospecting

Photography has the ability to document and reflect time using the power of aesthetic to appeal to our nostalgic tendencies. In a world saturated with multimedia and an abundance of visual projections, photographers are recreating past lives, relived by contemporary characters. Historically, postmodernist art borrows from the past and recycles. As we progress through our lives, we live through our memories and the promise of creating more. As cinema has the ability to present dream worlds and times gone by, photography is increasingly blurring the lines between the two. By re-creating cinematic aesthetics through the use of traditional films and processes photographers are tapping into alternate realities where the present and past exist within the same moment.

Emilia Staugaard is a photographer that demonstrates this idea within her own work. Contemporary pop-culture is blended with retro styling that presents modern ideas around gender and appearances. Using film such as Kodak’s Portra 400, her work is soft, dreamy and inviting. Skin tones remind us of our younger selves and the combination of colour and texture invites the audience in, with a warm embrace. As a result, we are invited into a world, which presents an identity that harks back to the past, but is within reach of our time.

As Roni Horn states in the 2011 film Tacita Dean:

“Locked into an abstract context of technical progress, we climb an endless ladder of previously unexperienced clarities. Each fresh degree of definition gives retrospective approximation and a continuously new version of the old.”