"What do I see in the image? Is it there, was it there, will it be there? Who is she, what is she doing, where is she? How does the making of the image affect her, how does it affect what she is doing, how does it affect her immediate environment? How does the image, the making of the image, my reading of the image change the ordering of time? When did the image happen? Is it me, is it her?

Within these representations we seek woman-ness or man-ness: we locate what we identify as a clue, and decide on the basis of it that we have discovered a real sexual difference located as a property within the discrete person captured in the reality of the photograph. This location of difference then becomes the full presence required by the question of the image, and narrative takes hold and is constructed, which places the subject of the image within a framework of events and details, and their precise ordering. Further, because so much personal reference is required in this production of meaning through involvement with the image, we entail ourselves within the recognition.

Image/woman/text 1979. Collection TATE.
colour photographs and texts mounted on two panels
48" x 48"

I am presenting here a series of photographs in which the visual codes are uniformly limited in order to minimise representation to the degree that the presence referred to in the captions, the subject matter of the photo is experienced as an absence and is not as is usually the case: accommodated, filled in, completed, in the constitution of meaning. So in these images the fictional discourse is only partly closed by the captions, we can still ask the questions, at the same time as observing our responses to the presences invoked.

Added to this, the images are of women because in this particular kind of articulation of truth that I am referring to, documentary images of women are notoriously malleable in this way, they are "signs emptied of meaning" and I am attempting representations of women which, whilst pointing to this form of construction, also intervene in it".

(From "ISSUE Social Strategies by Women Artists 1980, Exhibition catalogue - statement by the artist)

 

Image/woman/text 1979 Installation.
Installation view B2 Gallery, London 1981 in exhibition "Light Reading"

"This piece comprises two composite panels of photographs. On one panel, photos have been xeroxed and painted over, reduced to the minimum of information. What is most striking is therefore the signs of manufacture or the 'painterly gesture'. The reference is therefore to Modernist Practice and discourse. In the second panel the same images are printed in a high gloss, restoring the pleasure and plenitude of the photographic image............. The juxtaposition aims to reveal the lack in a photograph, what, who is photographed is absent, no longer there. Reduced to pure visibility, the photograph is empty of meaning, except of its manufacture"
from Griselda Pollock - Feminism and Modernism p112 in Framing Feminism, Pandora 1987

Image/woman/text 1979
Left hand panel detail

Image/woman/text 1979
Right hand panel detail

Image/woman/text 1979 Installation.
Installation view ICA Gallery,London 1980 in Exhibition "ISSUES"

Image/woman/text 1979 Detail. Collection TATE.
Left hand panel detail

Image/woman/text 1979 Detail. Collection TATE.
Right hand panel detail