Lot Doms

The intriguing work of Lot Doms is built on the premise that even in our image saturated world, it is still possible to experience this primal feeling when looking was an adventure, filled with excitement for what was freshly revealed to our eyes. This desire to be amazed by the visual marvels the world has to offer can be fulfilled in different ways: by moving outside of the confines of the familiar, by traveling to foreign lands and sites unseen, but also, and more importantly, by simply putting a technological recording device (a camera) between us and the world. Doms seems to understand that the camera cannot be reduced to a simple instrument to capture the world as it is, but on the contrary must be understood as an imaginative tool to upend our understanding of it. Her images emphasize how this apparently transparent (because purely technological) medium creates images that are often at odds with our way of perceiving the world. In deconstructing the photographic way of seeing, Doms predominantly focuses on the optical possibilities contained within the photographic procedure. Through a series of limited but very pointed manipulations, she uses (simple) optical tools to create (complex) visual riddles. By playing with the difference between dark and light, for instance, or by upsetting the relationship between far and nearby, by extremely compressing or expanding the field of vision, by dramatically inversing the tonal range or by simply turning the image upside down, she creates bewildering images that confound and surprise. In the end, we’re confronted with images that have become self-contained, autonomous worlds, showing a reality that only exists in the flat space of the printed paper. As such they speak of a deep fascination for the unexpected (and also a little bit disturbing) tendency of photography to combine a seemingly realistic description of the world with its own specific kind of disquieting abstraction.

Text: Steven Humblet