Dorottya Balkó: Your work is mainly concerned with the idea of authorship and the way authorial certainty „slips its leash”. Can you talk a little bit about your artistic journey to the use of photographic slide transparences and the reason this question interests you?

Daniel Rapley: I began my artistic career as a painter 25 years ago. I used to make rather methodical paintings that would be broken down into thousands and thousands of lines of information, appearing like pixels on the canvas. Through the process of impasto, I created surfaces that included traces of human presence while appearing to have a photographic quality. Even then, I was interested in reducing the human process to a mechanical one, mimicking the operation of a camera.

Daniel Rapley: Station 5, oil on canvas, 2006 (detail of painted surface)

At a certain point, I became interested in what it means to be an artist, and what it means to make something that complicates ideas of authorship. The idea of artistic labour and the question of whether a large investment of time gives any surplus meaning or value to an artwork excited me. During my master’s studies at Chelsea College of Arts in London, I started to think about new formulas that allowed me to explore the topic of appropriation and further reduce my artistic process into mechanical tasks. For instance, one work from this period was concerned with the Bible and its surrounding belief system, which I compared to the system of the art world. I created a handwritten version of the Bible, and I installed it as a stack of paper in a display case, so that the audience could never know whether I had truly copied the whole book. For another durational project, I collected shells from different sites in England, essentially accumulating the work of another organism. I was reflecting on the contradiction between the myth of the artists as ‘genius’ – the unique originator of something new and innovative –, and the reality of the artistic process which draws inspiration and ideas from all around us. In the last ten years or so I've been exploring these ideas through photography, which is a perfect medium, as the historical discourse surrounding its relation to authorship is a rich area of research. One day, following a gut feeling, I ordered a batch of 35 mm slide transparencies from eBay, and I began creating this work. 

Although human figures can be vaguely discerned in urban and natural landscapes in your works, the narrative of the photographs becomes largely insignificant. When you are searching for two slides to pair with each other, what visual codes are you looking for to match? What makes two slides belong together?

There have been many people throughout the history of photography doing double exposures or photomontage, but I was interested in exploring it in a slightly different way. Whereas other artists have explored it more as a surrealist project, I am interested in colliding the images in an abstract way. I am looking at the colours, the textures, the formal qualities of each image, how they blend to create something totally different, otherworldly, and dream-like that communicates the materiality of photography. When you see the images, you immediately know that they are photographic in character, but they become something else as well. They confound the idea of photography by producing an image that is not as easily readable as photographs are intended to be. The images I create become a puzzle to solve, which defies the presumed purpose of photography. In fact, they showcase an abstract painterly quality. The reduction of the significance of the pictures’ content helps democratising all my material. Each slide becomes as important as the other, no matter what their content is. 

While experimenting with the material, you also practice some restrictions in your creative process. One of the authors featured in the book, curator Jonathan Casciani writes that you only work with photographic slide transparencies of the same format, you only work with two slides at the same time, and you can only place them on top of each other. Can you walk us through your process and explain why you choose to set up these specific rules?

Chance plays an important part in the process, as I am pulling slides out of the box without knowing what their subject is. While experimenting, I lay out several light boxes and have slides scattered all over them. Then, I pick a couple of slides up and try placing them on top of one another to see what happens; to see the particular way the colours and the textures overlap and merge. When it works, it feels like an epiphany, but this doesn't happen often. It is a very slow, time-consuming and methodological process, which is my preferred way to work. For instance, Drift has been going on for about six or seven years now and it has resulted in maybe fifty images that I think work truly well. In my opinion, everything we do as artists gets filtered through chance; that there's always a degree of uncertainty surrounding the creative process. Rather than restricting chance, I prefer celebrating it. With that said, there must be a structure around chance that provides its meaning, otherwise, the process gets chaotic. Personally, routine, structure, and order are important to me. Everything I have done artistically had some strict structure, order, or method to follow. It is about finding a balance between chance and control – they have an interesting and complicated relationship in my work. 

In Drift, the slides placed on top of each other fit perfectly, creating a whole new, third picture. On the other hand, in your project titled Postcards from Nowhere, we can at times clearly see the edge of a slide, highlighting the process and effect of layering. What does the difference between the two approaches mean to you?

Alongside making artworks, I have also been a picture framer for seventeen years or so. My experience in this field makes me think a lot about the conceptual idea of framing, which correlates with photography, as it is also a framing process. In a new work of mine, which I have not yet shown, I have been experimenting with frames that intersect or have irregular shapes, as well as with images that cut in and out of other images. So framing and playing with the boundary of an image has become quite important to my process. In recent years, there has been a general fascination with revealing the frame of a 35 mm image, it has become a sort of cliché nostalgic motif. But I think it can also touch upon the strangeness or uncanniness of believing in the image, only to be disrupted by the fact that it is just an image. There is a certain uncanniness in photography that is rooted in the constant wavering between belief and disbelief; in the conflict between image and surface; between the physicality of something and its image. I find this to be a quite unsettling feeling.

This strange and uncanny feeling in photography is fascinating. Photographs imply a certain depth that cannot be reached through its flat surface, which creates a strange relationship between the image and its spectator. 

When photography first appeared, we can only imagine how disorientating and alien it must have seemed. As our ability to understand photographic images developed further, we have gotten past this initial reaction, but I think there is still a residual strangeness left in the experience of photography and film. They carry an underlying uncanniness that we perhaps only experience at a subconscious level. Since I am especially interested in this phenomenon, I asked Dr Nicholas Royle, who researches the uncanny as an academic, to write an essay about the topic for Drift. In my opinion, the uncanny works in different ways. On the one hand, there is an uncanniness, an unsettling feeling in relation to the photographic images that you are seeing; on the other hand, they carry a certain authorial strangeness as well. Coming back to Postcards from Nowhere, there is something even more otherworldly about those images because, instead of positive transparencies, I have photographed negatives, so they appear in reverse colour. Some of those images have become almost unrecognizable in terms of what you are looking at, however, you are still able to determine that they are photographic at their source. Being so unable to extract what the content of the photographic image is creates an intellectual conundrum, so to speak. This sense of intellectual uncertainty is ultimately at the core of uncanny. 

Regarding the uncanny, I find it really interesting how we not only tend to get this feeling from analogue materials and artworks based on them, but also from generative images. 

Absolutely! That brings to mind two amazing books, one is Techgnosis by Erik Davis, and the other is Haunted Media by Jeffrey Sconce. They both shed light on the idea that, throughout history, certain mythological or religious structures embed themselves into the technological advances – how spiritual belief systems find ways to re-spawn in a secular age, often within technological media, whether analogue or digital. This is partly where I see a link with the Uncanny. But there is also a sense that just the act of seeing an image involves a process of embodying the vision of the person who took the image, which is weird when you think about it. Similar to when reading, we occupy the minds and thoughts of another. I find it slightly disembodying – almost a form of ventriloquy. 

Coming back to Drift, you started this series in 2017, but it was only five years ago that you began the process of creating a book out of it. What made you interested in the book form? What new aspects did the medium provide for the project?

As a teacher, I find bookmaking to be a great medium to introduce new skills and ideas to students. It can teach them a lot of technical skills, while the sequencing of images and the process of finding the right format for the book enhances their visual awareness. While teaching, I became really interested in bookmaking myself – I found the process useful as it allowed me to meditate on my work. At a certain part of my creative process, I would start thinking about how the project could work as a book and how the physicality of the book could feed into the ideas that are being explored. After a while, a symbiotic relationship has formed between my projects and the book form; the experiment with the book started affecting my work and vice versa. The idea to express Drift in a book form has formed naturally, as I have created several smaller books which have played a crucial part in the way the work has shaped itself. 

Drift was made with Swiss binding, and its exposed spine connects nicely with the nature of the photographic material. What was your concept behind the book’s design?

I tried to design a book that gives off an interesting physical presence. I love using the Swiss binding technique because I enjoy seeing the mechanics of a book. The exposed spine also relates to the work conceptually, since the images are exposing the mechanics of photography; so, the mechanics of the book reflect the mechanics of the work. Given the abstract nature of the images, I also loved playing with their sequencing and finding the right rhythm in the colours and scales as they follow one another. I enjoyed coming up with the placement of the full bleed pages that show microscopic enlargements of the surface of the slides. Only a couple of millimetres of their surfaces are shown, but they become a world of their own consisting of debris, tiny insects, fibres of human dust or hair, and little scratches. The enlargements enable us to closely examine the material condition and the history of the material itself.

These microscopic enlargements are placed in the very beginning – on the cover, to be exact –, the middle and the end of the book, offering it an interesting shift in scale and structure. What is the role of these types of photographs in the book?

I was making this work alongside my grandmother’s slow decline with dementia. She passed away at the age of 104, after having struggled with this condition for ten years. It was quite a hard period for our family. Nevertheless, it was during this time that I found myself fascinated by the relationship between photography and memory, and the slippages between the two. When we used to show my grandmother photographs, she would momentarily ‘come back to life’, so to speak. She would start recalling memories and then, after a minute or so, she would go back into herself. The way I structured Drift offers a similar journey as you travel through different optical registers; one moment, you are immersed into the details of an enlargement, then you turn a page and zoom out to a smaller scale image, just to be pulled back into the details on the next page. The confusion embedded into abstract images could also be representative of memories becoming muddled and tangled up. 

We have talked about your artworks being long term, durational projects. Having worked on Drift for eight years, would you consider it a finished project, or are you planning on further experiments?

Yes, I am absolutely planning to continue working on it. I have found this process immensely enjoyable as well as intellectually and practically engaging, so I see myself continuing it forever, alongside other work.