‘The weather was bright and visibility was good; this was the best camouflage I have ever seen.’ — U-boat commander, quotation from: Tim Newark, Camouflage (London: Thames & Hudson/Imperial War Museum, 2007), p. 74.
The saying ‘To hide in plain sight’ describes something or someone that defies detection by being too obvious. It is this dichotomy that Hannah Rozpara’s work Transparency draws our attention to. Through sleight of hand or, in this case, light and photography, Rozpara documents the properties of translucent materials to reveal that they are anything but.
As a scholar of ‘dazzle camouflage,’ the first world modernist patterns used to disrupt and mislead ‘enemy’ warfare, Rozpara reminds us that polarised extremes can easily join around the back; what is transparent can be opaque, what is obvious can be imperceptible, and what is truth can be fabricated.
Rozpara is a mixed-media artist, which makes her choice of photography for these works all the more poignant. She is very much aware that the medium has its own issues with representation. By offering us the 5×4-inch negative frame around these large artworks, she refers to the sacrosanct claim of the un-cropped image, while at the same time reminding us that the act of photography can be as opaque as the transparent materials she presents on these walls.
This exhibition is part of the ShowOFF Section of Krakow Photomonth.
