SAMMY HAWKER

20/20 alludes to visual acuity; perfect sight.

Within the restrictions of its four borders, every photograph is flawed. A tension arises for what exists beyond the scope of vision, beyond the fixed frame of the frozen moment. There is a yearning to know more.

In his book Camera Lucida Roland Barthes describes this yearning towards a photograph of his mother: ‘If I like a photograph, if it disturbs me, I linger over it…I look at it, I scrutinise it, as if I wanted to know more about the thing or the person it represents. ...I want to see it better, to understand it better, to know its truth....’ Barthes turns the photograph over in order to try and reach through into its depth.‘Alas, however hard I look, I discover nothing: if I enlarge, I see nothing but the grain of the paper...The Photograph is flat, platitudinous in the true sense of the word, that is what I must acknowledge.’

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film ‘Blow Up’, the central character David Hemmings becomes fixated upon an image. He believes he can see a blurred figure hiding in the bush, a potential murderer. He makes repeated enlargements of the image, which becomes grainier and grainer further frustrating the truth behind the image.

This image was taken at Broulee beach and processed with ocean water collected from site. It was early winter and the cold light made the day seem timeless and full of potential.

I spend an afternoon enlarging the negative in the darkroom. I pour over the abstracted details, trying to come closer to the truth. Contrary to Barthes I find the details bring me closer to the ocean that lives inside the crusty tactility of the salt-stained negative.

The artist would like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land that this body of work was created, the Walbunja people of the Yuin nation.