Elizabeth Gossling: BURN at Tintype Gallery

From 1947 until 1968, a man named John Cura sat in front of a television set with a camera and photographed what was being broadcast. His tele-snaps, a run of stills taken off the screen for each programme, were sold to actors, directors and producers who otherwise had no record of their own work, because live television in those years simply went out and was gone. He took more than a quarter of a million of them. After he died in 1969 the BBC declined to take the collection, and it was destroyed; the story goes that it was burnt. For a good number of programmes wiped from the archives, Cura’s snaps are now the only pictures that survive.

That story is the seed of BURN, Elizabeth Gossling’s new show at Tintype on Essex Road in Islington, open from 16 April to 9 May 2015. Gossling imagines Cura turning into something else, a figure she calls Cura Obscura: a human camera, mutating under the impossible task of catching every image as the channels multiply and the flow of pictures speeds up. She talked about the work with the UK street-art quarterly Very Nearly Almost before the opening.

Why BURN

The title, she explained, carries several meanings at once. The obvious one is the supposed burning of Cura’s archive. But she also had in mind the television sets of his era, pre-war and early post-war models so unstable that they earned nicknames like “widow makers” and curtain burners. There is the way viewers now burn through images on glowing screens, and there is burning in the old sense of writing data onto a disc, a method of recording that has itself already dated.

The scanner that failed

The images in the show were made with the help of a specialist 3D printing firm in London. They scanned a male model, five television sets from the years Cura was working, and pieces of Gossling’s own photographic kit. The equipment did not scan well, she said, because its reflective surfaces confused the process. That failure is where the look of the work comes from: the scanned objects came back grey, powdery and incomplete, as if made of ash.

A cremation, not a portrait

Asked whether the drained greys were a deliberate way of stripping the humanity out of her figures, she said the story had carried Cura somewhere close to myth. As Cura Obscura he becomes an optical chamber and a digital corpse, a symbol of an archive that is evaporating, stuck in a compulsion to capture every image even as those images vanish from the screen. The exhibition had turned into something closer to a cremation, she said, partly because of the ashy surfaces the scanning produced. Since Cura’s whole world was black and white, keeping the show nearly colourless followed naturally.

Arresting motion

The conversation touched on William Faulkner’s line that the artist’s aim is to arrest motion by artificial means. Gossling thought Cura’s project could be seen in exactly that light. He was making a lasting picture record of broadcasts that were live and fleeting by nature and would otherwise be lost for good, and he was convinced that record would prove valuable in years to come, both as business and as cultural history. She pointed out that a photograph of something moving says something quite different from a photograph of a still object, which is part of why screen grabs interest her. In her own practice she tends to set one technology’s history against another’s, and that friction is what gives the pictures their sense of movement.

The language of failure

Image failure has long interested her, and Cura’s notes gave her a vocabulary for it. He had a set of technical terms for the faults he saw on screen, among them ghost images, saw toothing, flaring and corona discharge, and she found the words so strong that they fed directly into the language of the show. What is broken or incomplete, she argued, tends to expose the structure beneath an image’s surface, and that gives a way in to understanding how it was built and how it ought to be read.

The gallery keeps an exhibition page for the show.