The exhibition includes the site of Lacock Abbey and several images of The Latticed Window, the primal scene of reproducible photography and a frequently cited starting point in the narrative of the medium’s history. It was at this site that what came to be known as “the world’s first negative” was produced, giving rise to the negative/positive dichotomy and to the new possibilities offered by the photographic image through its capacity to be enlarged or reduced, infinitely copied and reproduced.

In the work Frame Working, Beata Fransson has used a scale model of a classic analogue contact sheet. The contact sheet is a standardised framework within analogue photography and a central part of the photographic working process. For an analogue photographer, the strip of film and its limited exposures constitute a kind of narrative structure—something that orders and shapes the work. In recent years, interest in the contact sheet has grown, not least as a way of making visible the sequences of events—the before and after—surrounding the exposure that is ultimately selected to become the image.

The exhibition takes its title from a series of loosely assembled works and sketches in which Katarina Elvén makes use of inherited belongings from deceased fathers. This material legacy includes, among other things, numerous boxes of paper intended for black-and-white analogue darkroom printing. These more or less light-damaged papers form grid compositions in random greyscales. Among the inherited items is also a copy of Karl Liebknecht’s book Militarism and Anti-Militarism (containing extensive study circle notes from 1909), which has been used for a series of fragmented black-and-white photograms. Dead Fathers can also be associated with deceased authors, fathers who die in war, or perhaps with a slogan for dismantling patriarchal systems.

Since 2020, under the headings Le vocabulaire de la photographie and Photography at Work, Katarina Elvén and Beata Fransson have collaborated on research-based investigations funded by project grants from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee (Konstnärsnämnden). These headings have functioned as platforms for collective discussions and practical work in the form of teaching, workshops, study circles, and lecture series in collaboration with several institutions. A recurring approach for Elvén and Fransson—also reflected in this exhibition—has been to level hierarchies, both in relation to users of the photographic medium and in relation to the photographic apparatus itself. Instead, their focus has been on the agency of technology and on a deconstruction of thelanguage that the medium has generated.

Katarina Elvén is based in Stockholm and holds a Master’s degree in Photography (2004) from Akademin Valand in Gothenburg. She is a Senior Lecturer in Photography and has taught at, among other institutions, Konstfack and Akademin Valand.

Beata Fransson is based in Stockholm and graduated from the Malmö Art Academy in 2004. She has exhibited and partaken in residencies in Sweden and internationally.