Painting, Photography, and the Living Archive: On Juxtaposition, Ethics, and the Afterlife of Images
The relationship between painting and photography lies somewhere between the tactile and the mechanical; the interpretive and the evidential. As image culture continues to accelerate, this tension has grown more potent, prompting many contemporary artists to return to the photographic archive less as a site of documentation, but as a space of instability and possibility. My own practice, positioned within this ongoing dialogue, begins with an archive I have spent years assembling: a collection of photographs and interviews drawn from more than sixty categories, ranging from personal narratives to institutional material and found, anonymous imagery. It is within this ever-shifting repository that I discover ambiguities and emotional traces that become the foundation of my work.
The impulse to work from photographs is not, in itself, new. Gerhard Richter’s blurred Atlas images moved fluidly between snapshot and painting, challenging the supposed authority of photographic truth. Luc Tuymans’s paintings, emerging from archival images and low-resolution film stills, revealed how memory becomes distorted through mediation. Christian Boltanski built vast installations from orphaned photographs, treating them less as documents and more as fragile vessels of absence. Writers like Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, and Tina Campt have shaped our understanding of photographs as emotional and ethical objects, charged with histories, yet always incomplete.
But what links these disparate practices is not merely the use of photographs. It is a recognition that the archive, whether personal or collective, is never neutral. Every image is shaped by acts of selection, care, neglect, and re-encounter. The archive is not a fixed resource; but over time has become a living system that expands and regenerates. Each time I return to it, new patterns and tensions emerge. A photograph that once appeared definitive reveals unexpected ambiguity; an overlooked detail becomes a catalyst for a new work. The archive is a field of relations where real and imagined connections are made. They are also in a way for me, a study of time, outside of regulated hours, days or years but sporadic moments once lived.
When these images enter my paintings, they do so with this instability intact. Through liquid watercolour, powder pigment, charcoal, and oil, the body becomes a site of both revelation and concealment. The the static photographic image dissolves into these fluid materials, the once fixed figure becomes porous, stradled between presence and absence. This instability mirrors my interest in the ethics of looking and what it means to engage with images of vulnerability, trauma, or uncertainty without claiming ownership over them. Unlike the camera’s fixed view, the paintings resist definitive readings and extend the image through enlargement, colour, erasure; tactile elements that offer more open questions about what you are looking at. They call attention to what slips beyond the frame, what cannot be fully known, and seek to heighten a sense of connection through the slower, more reflective act of observing and being with a painted image, in contrast to the quickness of the photograph.
This process resonates with artists like Marlene Dumas, who works from her own extensive image archive comprised of press and personal photographs, and speaks about painting as a means of slowing down the image, forcing it into ethical relation; or Njideka Akunyili Crosby, whose densely layered collaged surfaces draw from personal and political photographic archives to complicate identity and memory. Like these artists, I treat photographs as sites of negotiation, between the personal and the communal, between representation and responsibility.
The juxtaposition of images to create new compositions and narratives play a crucial role in how these negotiations unfold. Arranging photographs in the studio or creating a sequence for a series of new works, I am attentive to the ways meaning emerges not from solitary images but from the gaps and frictions between them. A photograph from a found archive may echo, contradict, or illuminate one from a recorded interview. A painted figure may appear to respond to a neighbouring photograph, creating a dialogue that neither work holds alone. This form of juxtaposition mirrors archival logic while simultaneously interrupting it; it gestures toward categorisation even as it destabilises it. I can’t logically define exactly what I’m seeking in this process, yet this way of working keeps returning to me like a quiet, persistent call.
Such dynamics also shape how I approach the body. I’m drawn to moments when bodies or expressions resist clarity, when narratives or gestures remain unresolved. These are the spaces where empathy activates: not through the recognition of a complete, knowable figure, but through meeting another’s vulnerability without assuming full understanding. My work asks viewers to occupy this space of uncertainty, to recognise that images, like people, cannot be pinned down without consequence. This is the ethical dimension that underpins my practice and returns, again and again, to the archive: the understanding that images carry lives within them, and those lives deserve careful attention.
As the archive grows and shifts, it continues to shape both the content and form of my work. Each painting becomes a place where multiple temporalities coexist: the moment captured in the photograph, the time of its return in the studio, and the viewer’s present encounter. In this convergence, painting and photography complicate one another, each revealing what the other withholds. My work inhabits this terrain, as a lived practice shaped by encounter, ambiguity, and care. By reanimating images from my archive and allowing them to find new configurations through paint, I hope to create works that speak to the histories they carry as well as to the shared vulnerability that binds us.
