The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have now is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then. It is thus at the level of this denoted message or message without code that the real unreality of the photograph can be fully understood: its unreality is that of the here-now, for the photograph is never experienced as illusion, is in no way a presence. . .its reality [is] that of the having-been-there. . . .
Roland Barthes 1
Elizabeth Mellott-Carreon's three-dimensional photographic constructions and solarized silver gelatin prints engage Roland Barthes' notion of the singular consciousness entailed by the photograph. Both the constructions and solarized silver gelatin prints are considerations of the separations endured by military families.
Thrust from the gallery wall into the viewer's physical space, Mellott-Carreon's boxes model the spaces they enclose and evoke. The front plane of he boxes forms a picture plane behind which a virtual space is deployed. Combining photograms, photographs, three-dimensional objects and incorporating integral lighting components, the boxes are miniature theatres. The constructions within the stage set like boxes modeling situations experienced by military personnel are imagined-created as images-by the artist, exteriorized analogues of the interior space of the imagination.
The solarized silver gelatin prints of the Interstices series indexically entail temporality in their facture, and in their signification.2 When the artists visits her husband at his base, he has flowers waiting, and after the artist's departure leaves them to wither in their vase until her next visit. At the end of each visit with her husband, the artist takes the flowers from the previous visit and places them in a contact print frame with silver gelatin paper. Exposed to sunlight for the duration between visits, the resulting photograms are extremely overexposed, causing the silver gelatin paper to solarize-to cause values in the image to become partly reversed, metonymic3 for the reversal of presence and absence.4
The viewer, in the defined physical space of the darkened gallery, encounters these works closely, intimately. Their scale, and the conditions of viewing constrained by the frontal aperture of the boxes and the low key value scale of the Interstices prints, require this closeness, which is correlative with the intensity of the personal psychological space of lives the works allow the view to engage.
Elizabeth Mellott-Carreon is professor of photography at Collin County Community College. Mellott-Carreon received the Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Texas, and the Bachelor of Fine Arts from Texas Woman's University. Recent exhibitions include Instant Gratification, Arlington Museum of Art; Artists Responding to Violence, Diaries of an Enlistment and One Day, Fotofest International 2006; Distance and Trace, University of Texas at Dallas; and the forthcoming exhibition re-collect, Gallery Luzansky, Brno, Czech Republic.