Streams (IV)
2018
Giclée Print on Hahnemühle Baryta
500 X 750 mm

Streams (2015 - ongoing) metaphorically transposes and extends the site and aesthetics of what is referred to as the ‘Stop Bath’ in photographic film processing – where exposed images stop developing – to rivers, as an investigation into the emergence, pooling, agency, contextual unsettling and dissolution of photographs. Bodies of photographs are wetened, sink and are held in the differing flows of the river. Photography becomes part of the river’s morphology, and the river an archive of photographic temporalities. Streams is an analogue (35mm) mediation of streaming, the concurrent uploading and downloading of data, with the screen transformed via an ecology of touch. Imagining the ongoing series as part of a continuum towards the ocean, De Swardt draws upon the fluvial as a system of non-settling. Across the works, he gestates photographs as unstable surfaces, linguistic substitutes and bodily extensions to reflect changing relations to the mnemonic capacities of photography. Streams becomes a methodology for collage without cutting.

Streams (I)
2015
Giclée Print on Hahnemühle Baryta
500 X 750 mm

Streams (V)
2021
Giclée Print on Hahnemühle Baryta
500 X 750 mm

Streams (II)
2015
Giclée Print on Hahnemühle Baryta
500 X 750 mm

Streams (III)
2015
Giclée Print on Hahnemühle Baryta
500 X 750 mm

Streams (VI)
2021
Giclée Print on Hahnemühle Baryta
500 X 750 mm

Streams (VII)
2021
Giclée Print on Hahnemühle Baryta
500 X 750 mm

Streams (VIII)
2021
Giclée Print on Hahnemühle Baryta
500 X 750 mm