Elisabeth Tonnard

A portfolio of b&w silver gelatin prints, to be hung across a room and/or kept as a box. 2007

Ithaca is a mythological place. It is not a landscape, but a dream of arrival. I try to picture it, to get a closure of the vision, but it is lying just outside my eye. I can only focus on other places. The place that I am really looking for, is always around a corner or behind a mountain or across the night.  Photography creates a center of attention. A photograph is like an island in the sea. It seems to be telling us that we have arrived at the final destination. But this is false. It is just one of the other places again.

In this work I have used photography to convey the notion of a continuous non-arrival. An itinerary can be defined as a line of travel, a sketch of a proposed route, an account of a journey, or a portable altar. Every image here is a momentary closure of the vision, until the next image. All images are printed from the same negative. The project has no end or beginning – it is in fact a fragment of an imaginary archive that extends into infinity. There can be no final print and all prints fail equally at trying to be the one.

Made on request. Contact me for more information.