Cameras, Handwork, and Bodily Traces

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Laura Millard’s 2006 Lac Des Arcs depicts the traces left by skaters on an ice rink. The digital photograph’s surface is covered in handmade marks which serve as an index of the skaters and their motion over the ice. Millard’s work combines contemporary and nineteenth-century techniques: her handwork recalls the practice of overpainting in the late-nineteenth-century French sports press, where editors and photographers used drawing and painting to articulate the aesthetic and narrative importance of their photographs. Since its inception, overpainting’s practice and analysis have lived at the margins of art and media history. Once a shameful technique to which critics and printers of photographs in the late nineteenth century turned a blind eye, and still a phenomenon that remains difficult to locate in archives, overpainting has reemerged Millard’s work. This paper argues that the artist breaks down barriers between media forms and revisits questions about what kinds of image technology can most holistically provide a window into reality. Millard’s work makes clear that handwork can seemingly emphasise a photograph’s indexicality—those factors that enable connections between representation and the world—of the subjects and movement that the camera captured, despite drawing over top of indices of human movement

Computer Science · Intellectual Property Law