Vincent Lillis
My primary photographic practice has involved shooting for bands and musicians, making work for a host of alternative and underground artists in Ireland. Since studying photography at TU Dublin, I have explored a number of directions leading to a focus on more experimental concepts. Currently my work explores the relationships between the digital world and reality, looking at how these spaces intersect and how they can be represented via photography. These explorations touch upon political, religious and existential themes. I am interested in the often overlooked or ignored aspects of life, and how we interpret the clash between the virtual world and the actual.
Rosa Menkman’s Glitch Art has been a major influence on my recent work, William Klein’s Tokyo 1961 series and Klein’s personal take on photography has also been a major influence in how I think about photography, particularly regarding composition. Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows (陰翳礼讃) are key texts which have informed my photography, art and aesthetics.
Added & Removed
Added & Removed explores the detrimental effects of technological and environmental destruction on daily life via a series of photographic collage works. It points to societal fears which are prevalent and compounding, yet have no clear resolution. The project draws on the aesthetics of late 1970s punk fan-zines, using photographic fragmentation to present the audience with a dystopian commentary on modern living. Added & Removed has two major strands: one of construction and one of destruction. In the process of making the collages, the removal of source material from the photographs left behind a series of images with missing elements. This 'removed' side of the project became conceptually relevant in terms of its dialectical relationship to the broader themes of the project, encompassing aspects of loss while also documenting the physical process. Our reliance on technology and its impact on the natural world are thus juxtaposed in a series of uneasy relationships.
The US/Mexico border is a frequent source of controversial news stories in the western media. Largely due to issues of immigration and national security arising from the policies and campaign promises of the Trump administration. The concept of borders is subject to interpretation through historical, cultural and political contexts which situate photographic representations of it within layers of contested meaning and interpretation. My dissertation explores how the US/Mexico border is represented in photographs; particularly concerning media framing and how photographs are used to support political narratives constructed by news media. The examination of border rhetoric’s from partisan news sources is critically analysed from differing ideological perspectives. I ask the question: is it possible to empower audiences to identify and navigate the biases in how photographs are instrumentalised to support spurious news stories representing the divisive issue of transnational migration.
Photobook
The photobooks Added & Removed showcase a project on our relationship with technology and ecology through the formation of photographic collage works.
Added represents the main body of collages,
Removed contains the rements of the collage process..