BU Research Blog

Cretan Sea Submarine 4236

Our next instalment of the ‘Photo of the Week’ series features Rutherford’s image from his ongoing project entitled Submarines. The series is a weekly instalment which features an image produced by our fantastic BU staff and students. The photos give a glimpse into some of the fascinating work our researchers have been doing across BU and the wider community.

“Over more than thirty years of commercial and fine art photographic practice, I have often noticed remarkable disparities between the scenes, objects, events or moments ‘out there’ I had attempted to record – and the content of the resulting photographs. These sometimes subtle, sometimes drastic, and often unanticipated disparities between what I had seen and what the photograph shows me seem to be the result of significant differences between the ways in which we experience time and space – and the way in which the camera renders them,”

“My research investigates two inter-related notions; Whether the camera sometimes records scenes, events and moments that did not exist ‘out there’ but which were instead created by the act of photographing them and, to what extent our ability to recognise this phenomenon is impeded by the ontological and epistemological assumptions inherent within the language we use to describe what photographs ‘are’ and what they show us – for example, by describing (and thereby reinforcing the idea that) photographs are ‘taken’ rather than ‘made’”, explains Rutherford.

If you’d like find out more about the research or the photo itself then please contact Rutherford.

Or please visit Rutherford’s website: http://www.theshadowofthephotographer.co.uk/

This photo was originally an entry to the 2017 Research Photography Competition. If you have any other questions about the Photo of the Week series or the competition please email research@bournemouth.ac.uk.