They Are Not Windows: Luke White

4 - 25 February 2023 London

Overview

They are not windows but images, i.e., surfaces that translate everything into states of things; like all images they have a magical effect; and they entice those receiving them to project this un-decoded magic onto the world out there.

― Vilem Flussel, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 1984

They Are Not Windows is the first solo exhibition by photographer, Luke White, at the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery. The exhibition challenges ideas about the documentary aims of the photograph.

In his most recent body of work Luke White experiments with large-format black-and-white analogue photography and digital collage techniques. The result is one of ambiguous figuration and abstraction. These processes prompt an engagement with the photograph as dynamic, rather than the product of an instantaneous process.

Responding directly to the writings of the philosopher Vilem Flussel, in which the photograph is established as a mobile and ‘magical’ surface through which coded messages are transmitted, White explores how the malleability of the photograph translates to a permeable boundary that enables a sensory connection between artist, viewer, and subject. He states, 'We are all engaged in a kind of dance. It’s more like a dream world.’

‘My feeling is that when we wake up, we don’t stop dreaming. These fragmented, refracted, intimate spaces reflect the way I piece together and touch the world. I suppose I am trying to show what seeing actually feels like.’

Luke White's work has been published widely: in international magazines, and in numerous books on architecture and design. His portrait photographs have twice been selected for the prestigious Taylor Wessing Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery, London.