ARCHIVE

**Double Entendre**. Single screen tape slide projection transferred to betacam. Collaboration with Tariq Dajani 1996

Photo commission for Media Campaign Services: 12 silver gelatin prints from 35mm Kodak TMAX 400 negative.

Untitled. Photographers Gallery London 1997

**Landscape For An Imaginary Invalid** 1998. Nine selenium-toned silver gelatin prints from Kodak TMAX 400 35mm negative. Association of Photographers (AOP) Gallery, London 1998

**The Impossibility of Storytelling**.1999. Five iris prints from Kodak medium format colour transparency. ‘Inhabiting that borderland between something and nothing, these images remain profoundly ambiguous. Yet the fact that [they exist] at all…indicates that our proclivity to truth might not be quite so strong as our desire for the illusion of the world.’ (Jason Oddy, ‘The Impossibility of Storytelling’ Next Level Ed 1 Vol 2 2003)

*The Impossibility of Storytelling* Scene Gallery, New York 2003

**Six Words To Form An Impression**. De-bossed text on paper. Edition of 4 plus artist’s copy.

Sketch for **Parallax**. Split frame with glass, archival mount and blind aperture. Parallax was made in an edition of 2. Exhibited in London alongside *Six Words To Form an Impression* c.1998

We 2001 2:47 Looped recording made for the Limbus Gallery , Tel Aviv.

‘… a voice piece which deals with an attempt to recollect a particular space. At times, it seems as if memories of a scene of a crime are being spoken of. The objects and lighting are elusive and a sense of memory’s ambiguity is evoked’: Smadar Shefi, ‘Listening to Silence’ Ha’Aretz 6/2/2001

I had been thinking about Herzog and De Meuron’s virtualhouse.ch and about alternative ways of making and negotiating nonfactual space. My initial intention was simply to create a complicitous voice that coaxed the visitor to the gallery into remembering a succession of fictitious and slightly disturbing rooms that could be related to the gallery’s own architectural history (a disused bombshelter). By filling the gallery with the sound of the looped recording, I anticipated transforming the space itself (and the other works in it) into something figmental. But any gallery has its own very basic history. Its walls are a palimpsest of lost or conflicting narratives. This piece was as much about that. JD-B

Voiceover 2001 3:11 Audio CD, helium balloon.

Audio work made after a total eclipse of the sun in 1999. Released into the sky 10 June 2001 at 4.00pm Clissold Park, London as part of ‘High Art’ at the Stoke Newington Festival. Voiceover is a sound picture. It consists of a narrative told in vivid, visual language; the story of something ungraspable that seems important yet inconclusive; a detached and ambiguous detail that invites the listener to form an ‘after image’ of an impossible photograph.

**It’s Easy For Someone of My Age To Become Nostalgic**. Seven iris prints from Kodak medium format colour transparency. Mafuji Gallery London 2001 The photographs show us little more than the breakdown and reconstitution of detail in space through use of light; a kind of indexical flicker which staves off yet ultimately confirms a fear of erasure, fear of the underlying blankness of the paper to which the image is fixed, a fear of white. **J-DB**

Jerwood Photography Commission 2003. The Wapping Project, London. Towards a narrative-based image incorporating Jasper Morrison’s SIM Chair. Part of a series of commissioned film, choreographic and sound works for *All About Chairs*

**An Arrangement of Incidents** 2007 SX70 Polaroids

**Anonymous Vintage Snapshot** 2015. 24 Giclee prints with text on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm 40″x30″ Somewhere along the way I forgot. I forgot the simple wonder of what it feels like to open an envelope of random images – pulled from albums, falling into our laps from the distant past – and to hold these diminutive scalloped edged, creased, scratched, highly specific and intimate pieces of paper in one’s hand. I forgot just how small they are. I forgot how they smell. I flip each photograph automatically, looking for clues.
These images, all taken by anonymous photographers, are from a French online vintage print specialist with an outlet on Ebay, a site predicated on a very particular form of classification; in this case, the listing of specific components or features contained within the image that determine the market value of the amateur snapshot.
I soon noticed a number of strange things. Take, for example, the value afforded a photograph with a car in it. For a movie, all you might need is a gun and a girl. But, in a photograph, add a girl getting out of a car to an otherwise unremarkable image, and the value rises. Unidentified women in these images, unless they could be classified as a ‘pin-up’, seem to accrue value, or vanish from the description altogether, depending on what they had stood next to. I noticed, more generally, that photographs that were composed seemed to win out over those that were more immediate; though the latter, as sociologists tell us, like any freeze-frame of disarray, provide more ‘information’. Photographs from the same roll and of the same subject had different saleable components. Photographs with ‘mistakes’ (that often reminded me of styles, composition or subjects associated with canonical photographers) acquired a novelty value.
I became as interested in the listings as in the images themselves; resulting in many outstanding, beautiful or intriguing photographs being dropped from my final selection. Each of the snapshots chosen, in one way or another, stands as a counterpoint to the concision, emphasis, economy or utility of its current designation. With what is now thankfully a backward glance at that old, ambitious disenchantment with the photographic document I say, in each of the photographs that remain, There Are Things Here Not Seen in this Classification. **JDB**

Chronicle of a Sound 2 (2016) Twin-screen single channel SD video installation. B&W/Sound/14 mins 29secs (looped). ALA Tokyo 2016.