Aliki Braine is a London based artist working with photographic materials. Sure, we can just say she is a photographer, but that descriptor would be devoid of the necessary nuance to accurately define what she does and how she self-identifies as an artist. In the making of her photographic images, Aliki cuts, folds, hole punches, stickers, and otherwise physically confronts photographic negatives to simultaneously alter their content and enrich the context. While most of us would hesitate to permanently destroy a precious negative, Aliki, trained as a sculptor first, accentuates the materiality and objectivity of analog photography by considering the negative as an object first and as a subjective work second.

Aliki received her BFA from The Ruskin School of Art at Oxford University and an MFA from The Slade School of Fine Art at University College London. After ten years of working in museum education services, she then retrained as an art historian earning a second graduate degree specializing in 17th C. non-Italian painting from the Courtauld Institute, London. She now works as an educator and Lecturer for The National Gallery, The Wallace Collection, Christie’s Education and The Arts Society.

Her expertise as an art historian, specifically in early landscape paintings, keep her art practice in direct conversation with artists before her who were also very interested in making work in a medium that directly addressed that medium. Meta paintings of the 17th Century–paintings which discuss painting– relate directly to the meta photography she creates now. By showing us how to reinvest in looking at photographs as an object, she is also creating a space for us to ask important questions about the history of the photograph and how it is has changed the way we interact with and interpret images since the advent of digital technology.

By digging her heels in and committing to only working in analog materials, Aliki asks her viewer to slow down and to thoughtfully reconsider what a photograph is. She would like to remind us that all contemporary photography still has roots in formal traditions of image-making, and, by directly manipulating the negative and leaving her indelible mark, she is also introducing the equivalent of brushstrokes to what she reveres as the otherwise cold photographic surface.

INTERVIEW

Shana Cruz-Thompson: Many creative pursuits have roots in childhood. Can you tell us more about you and your early exposure to art?

Aliki Braine: Sure! I had an unusual upbringing in that my family is French but, because my father was a diplomat, we moved all over Europe and North Africa as a child. I grew up speaking many foreign languages and my brothers and I were frequently taken to museums and encouraged to look at art. I loved works which I felt able to copy and still have notebooks with drawings after Picasso and other modernists. I think because I was always engaged in visual art, I knew I wanted to be an artist from early on. I was endlessly making drawings, paintings, sculptures and loved crafts. For the longest time–until I was at the end of my first year of my undergrad at the Ruskin School of Art, I was convinced I was going to be a sculptor.

SCT: Can you walk us through your beginnings studying sculpture and how your art practice became photo-based?

AB: It’s actually taken me until embarrassingly recently to realize I’m not a sculptor! I have only recently realized that my work has been understood within the realms of photography. Until then, I still thought I was making sculpture when I clearly wasn't, but that's how I understood the work. When I was at Ruskin, I realized that I really wanted to work with photographs, but not necessarily photography. I have this vivid memory of realizing that it doesn't matter what the photographs were of, people wanted to look at the object of the photograph itself. I remember thinking that I could take photographs of anything, and because it's photographic, it's alluring to people on its own as an object. Remember, this was before the new millennium, before digital photography, and before mobile phones. The internet was not yet really a thing for us, so photographs were always physical objects. I had this strong sense that I wanted to work with photographic material, but I was still very much a sculptor at heart, so I was literally making piles of photographs and showing them as objects by just dumping them on the floor. My first works with photography in undergrad were really sculptures! That’s still one of the main threads that runs throughout my practice, is to think of photographs as objects, and that's what I've been really engaged with. This theme continued through my MFA at the Slade. I was by then very much working with photography, but still, my interest was in “making” photographs as opposed to “taking” them. It is a real cliché, but when I say “making” it’s not just because I’m acknowledging the subjectivity of photography, it is because I want to keep getting physical with the print and the negatives. You know, very early on, I realized that a photograph just wasn't enough. It's a gorgeous object, but it fell short! I couldn't just “click” and only look at that image. I wanted to get under its skin, I wanted to, again...just get physical with it!

SCT: The photograph as an object is your first main theme, can you talk about the other themes you that are evident in your work?

AB: Yes, this is the first premise of my work ––the photograph as an object––this kind of fantasy that I'm actually a sculptor, not a photographer. The next is this interest in historical picture making in particularly in the history of Western European painting. The third is closely related to the second in that I am very interested in art historical images and my work being in conversation with artists from the past, primarily in connection to landscapes.

SCT: Why landscapes and is there a connection to the depiction of them to photography’s early beginnings in traditional landscape imagery and 17th C. painting?

AB: People often ask me why I work with landscapes and the reality is, I don't really know. I guess it's maybe that the camera is a helpful way of protecting myself from the bigger world and with a camera I can take in the awesomeness of the outside world in in smaller bits. It’s still very much an unanswered question for me. As for the second part of your question, you make a valid point that the birth of landscape painting in Western Europe and the landscape I’m interested in comes about in the Dutch 17th century, when at the same time, the pre-photographic technology is beginning to be invented. So, lenses, microscopes, telescopes, and of course the Camera Obscura. They are all being invented and utilized, and this is also when painting was becoming a scientific object as well as an image making object, just like photography was used. So, yeah, maybe it makes perfect sense. Maybe is that it’s not just the history of photography that’s bound in the landscape but also the prehistory of lens technology.

SCT: How has your interest in these 17th C. paintings and perhaps your career as an art historian and educator influenced your current body of work?

AB: It’s because I totally understood early on that photography is a constructed image. And in Western Europe, including in photography, every image that we make is bound within that historical tradition. And that's what I want to find out about. Art history is really one that has such a bad name because it’s so elitist and it's so often used for cultural appropriation and art washing. Considering how most of our information is given to us through imagery, it's really shocking that we don't teach formal looking. The only place where you get taught how to look, how to analyze visual material, how to consider the construction of images, is within the field of art history. Looking at and understanding historical paintings has helped me understand images and fall in love with image making.

SCT: Your work circles back on itself––It’s the thing itself and representational of the thing itself. Perhaps it’s meta photography? Am I on the right track?

AB: Absolutely! As an art historian, one of the things I really am interested in is 17th century meta painting–painting that discusses itself and the prehistory of abstraction. That's where I'm at with my photography, is that I'm interested in photographs that talk about photography, they are absolutely meta. They acknowledged themselves in the image.

SCT: Because you and I both experienced the dawn of digital technology first hand, I would love to hear your thoughts on digital photography and how it is changing the scope of our visual language. Why do you choose analog over digital technology?

AB: You know, one of the things that I cannot get over is just the mass of images that can now be made because of digital technology. It's estimated that 1.5 trillion photographs will be made in 2022. That is just so much material! We are literally drowning in photographic images. Like I mentioned earlier, through visual imagery is just how we communicate now. In Western Europe, all photographs are bound in art historical traditions, and if we don't know about them, if we don't teach children how to look at an image, so many things are lost in misinterpretation. In the UK, we teach children at a primary school to be critical readers of text. They learn about what is written in the text and that text isn't just authoritative, it has other things you need to consider. No one taught us about images in the same way, and the sheer number of mixed messages is bothersome. So, throughout my art my practice, one of the things that I became very obsessed with is that I only ever make work using analog technology. I'm not against digital photography, I use it to document my work, and my personal life, so I have no beef with it. But because I'm interested in images as objects and then as constructed material, I need something to hold on to, to interact with. I guess it's also to do with my age, but I don't understand where the photograph is on my phone. I can't control it because I don't even know what it is! I can control an analog photographic image because it is a tangible object. And to bring up age again, I started with analog photography, because that’s all we had. I got really comfortable with it. When I started manipulating images, I could have done it digitally, but would have been so much harder work because digital technology back then was slow and in its infancy. So much of my work even today is still so much quicker. It’s so easy to get a scalpel, a bone folder, or a hole punch and my negative and just go at it. It’s not magic or abstract, it’s a physical thing.

SCT: Can you walk us through ideation to the final image and how context becomes content?

AB: All my images are my own, I don’t use found images. I go off and I photograph the landscape, and I usually have an idea in mind. I often make little sketches to map out what my intention will be – both the overall composition but also how I will interact with the negatives once they are shot and developed. I use a Hasselblad reflex camera if I need/want a square image and a Mamiya rangefinder if I am working within a rectangle. I then develop the image and interact on the negative. Then I have the negative printed, and that's where the work comes to its full conclusion. A piece always starts with thinking about a historical body of work that I want to respond to, then finding a landscape motif and photographing that. The way I manipulate the negative of the image is directly related to the historical work. So, yeah, there are a lot of stages from ideation to realization of each piece.

SCT: Your work is rich in context, but there is evidence of play even, dare I say–craft involved in the making of the photographs. Is this another theme?

AB: In the terms of process, I've developed all these strategies for making the work which, in the nicest possible way, are really quite stupid! You know, I do really simple and playful things. One of the things I've been thinking about more recently is that those playful strategies are ones that I think have an element of a feminist stance on art history and on image making. You know, it sort of reminds me of Martha Rosler, the performance artists of the 60s and 70s, and her piece Semiotics of the Kitchen. It obvious that I don't use kitchen utensils to make my work, but I use the kind of the art materials of the children's nursery; I do cutting, sticking, and coloring in. This is the very feminine realm of the mother. There is a playful strategy which is sometimes not visible at first because people sometimes think my work is very slick and looks digitally manipulated, but it’s not! I literally use hole punches, stickers, I fold things, I cut things. Again, playful and simple.

SCT: How does this play carry over into the darkroom? How do tiny dots of hole punched negatives, folded negatives, and otherwise deconstructed negatives become something that you can project through an enlarger to make a print?

AB: Oh yes, the negative confetti! I used clear surfaces to compose my images with the negative or negative pieces into a negative carrier then I take them to be printed. I don’t have a darkroom, and I haven't made my own prints for years. Sometimes I prepare the composition in the negative carrier and leave it with some technicians who've been printing my work for over 20 years to print. Sometimes I am more hands on and it’s hilarious because I come walking in with my little envelope of negative confetti that I've made, and I give it a little shake onto the negative carrier and then he does a little test print for me and I go, “Oh, hang on, let me give them a bit more of a shake,” and it goes on like that until I get it right. It can be a fun process, but I don’t technically make the prints myself.

SCT: This seems like quite the leap of faith. Is it hard to let go of absolute control by handing over your work to be printed by someone else?

AB: Well, I was never a photographer, I didn't train as a photographer fully, I only know just enough to make the work I want to make. And I'm always willing to learn, but I have my limitations. I mean, I can't count, I can't mix chemistry, I always get it wrong. I just don't have the patience and I just couldn’t make the work the way I want to in the darkroom myself. I’m more concerned with making the image and playing with the negative. That’s where the work happens for me. And even if I was doing the same process that the technicians are, I still have to leave things up to chance. Especially working with small 3mm hole punched bits, there is a lot of static electricity and gravity that can shift pieces in the 6x9 negative carrier, so I really don’t always have absolute control.

SCT: Speaking of those 3mm negative dots, we first see these being used in the images with the cherry blossoms. Can you talk about this project your process?

AB: First of all, let me tell you that I have literally been punching holes in negatives for 20 years and it took that long for it to dawn on me that I could use the leftover dots in my work! This was an exciting moment and it happened because I was thinking about how the falling cherry blossoms mimic the falling negative confetti from hole-punching. Using negative confetti became a thing through that particular series, but now I think I can do that with anything and it’s just very exciting. The project itself started because firstly, I had been wanted to go to Japan since I was a teenager, so I dragged my husband and my two kids along with backpacks and my cameras. And because Sakura, the Cherry Blossom Festival, is a short temporal event, we weren't sure whether we'd be able to see any of it. I mean, I had a vague idea that I wanted to think about the Sakura blossoms that were left over on the street, but I didn’t know what I would make in Japan, I just knew that I was going to document that whatever landscape motifs I would find. The idea for the negative confetti came after I developed them. I ended up making two bodies of work from those images. One was the negative confetti series, A Thousand Fallen Blossoms, and the other is 10,000 Falling Blossoms, which, in its final form will be a book. In that one, I cover every single tiny fallen cherry blossom on my film reels with miniscule 3mm dot stickers I found at a Japanese stationary store. Ten thousand stickers, I counted! Well, probably not exactly 10,000 because–like I said before–I can’t count, but very close. There was lot of stickering!

SCT: That seems very meditative and ritualistic. What are you thinking about, not only in the covering of each blossom, but at all the times when you are manipulating a negative?

AB: It is very ritualistic. I think it's also this idea of physical mark-making and leaving my trace, sort of saying I was there. Yeah, you know, I think, the photographer’s so invisible on the surface of a traditional photograph; you don’t get the brush mark, or the fingerprints left behind. That's why I do it––because I don't like the aloofness of photography, it’s cold otherwise.

SCT: The theme of time seems to show up in your work in a few ways. Firstly, you invest time in shooting and then making the compositions with the negatives, then there is the idea of leaving your trace and being in conversation with artists throughout time. Can you speak to time as it relates to your work?

AB: About ten years ago, I became very fixated on one aspect of analog photography that relates directly to time. While taking a photo with an SLR camera, the moment that you take the photograph is the one moment you didn't actually witness. When you press the button, the mirror comes down and blinds the photographer, so the moment that you photograph is the one moment you haven't actually seen. And so, one of the things I really wanted to do was to reinvest looking. I wanted to slow down and look at these negatives because I had never actually seen those images before. I'd seen that the instant before and the instant after, but not that moment. I think it is about investing more time with the material as well, but an irony is that by investing more time into it, and by looking at it really closely, I am also literally destroying it in the process simultaneously by cutting, folding, hole punching and stickering. So, in 10,000 Fallen Blossoms, in order to ensure that I have looked at every fallen blossom that has been captured by my negative, I cover it up, and then it disappears.

SCT: Thank you for taking the time to share your work and expertise with us, Aliki. We are all about helping up and coming artists, so do you have any advice to lend to those that are just starting out in analog processes?

AB: I think the most important thing is to make work. The only thing that makes you an artist is to make art!

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Aliki Braine (b. 1976, Paris) studied at The Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford University, The Slade School of Fine Art, London and The Courtauld Institute of Art where she was awarded a distinction for her masters in 17th century painting.

Her work is interested in exploring the physical nature of photographic images and the debt photography owes to the history of western European painting. Often folding, drawing with ink, punching holes or overlaying her negatives with adhesive labels, she seeks to acknowledge the photograph as an object and the image as a construct.

Recent exhibitions include solo and two person shows in London, Birmingham, Vienna, Madrid and Paris and exhibitions including: ‘A Thousand Fallen Blossoms’, Argentea Gallery, Birmingham, 2021, ‘Die Blinde Fläche; Aliki Braine & Josef Zekoff’, Galerie Raum Mit Licht, Vienna, Austria, 2019, 'Veronica Bailey & Aliki Braine: Cross-Reference', dalla Rosa Gallery, London, 2018, ‘Evidences du Réel’, Musée d’Art de Pully, Lausanne, 2017, ‘Material Light’, Kulturni Centar, Belgrade, Serbia, 2015 and ‘On the (im)possibility of a pure praise poem’, Man & Eve Gallery, London, 2013.

Recent publications include British Art and the Environment, Charlotte Gould and Sophie Mesplède (ed), Routledge, 2022, Photomonitor, Portfolio, May 2020, Robert Shore, Beg, Steal and Borrow; Artists Against Originality, Elephant Books, 2017
Pauline Martin, L’Évidence, le vide, la vie; La photographie face à ses lacunes, Ithaque Editions, 2017, Brady Wilks, Alternative Photographic Processes: Crafting Handmade Images, Focal Press, 2015, Robert Shore, Post-Photography: The Artist with a Camera, Laurence King Pub, 2014.

Aliki is an associate lecturer for Camberwell College of Art, University of the Arts London and a regular lecturer for Christie’s Education, the Wallace Collection and the National Gallery. She lives and works in London.

Connect with Aliki on her Website and on Instagram!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shana Cruz-Thompson is an experimental photographer and mixed media artist based in Aurora, Colorado whose work explores nostalgia, grief, loss, and complex familial dynamics. Passionate about community outreach and arts education, she is the Education and Programs Manager at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center in Denver, Colorado, and the founder of Project Photo Op, a burgeoning nonprofit that strives to empower youth through photography workshops, mentorships, and exhibitions. As the creator and curator of Vigilante Darkroom Zine, she aims to champion women working in analog, experimental, and alternative photographic processes. Shana holds a BFA in Photography from the University of Colorado Denver and is mom to five incredible sons.

Connect with Shana Cruz-Thompson on her Website and on Instagram!