Veronica Bailey

Hermes Baby by Veronica Bailey is positioned alongside Birkin’s collection. Her equally complex depiction of the 1950s Korean War is uncharacteristically analogue.

The title describes the typewriter used by American journalist Marguerite Higgins at the front line. Bailey includes a diary of iPhone images which record the processes involved in creating this body of work.  Its colourful display contrasts with the perfection of the tiny, hand-printed white squares holding two-word phrases, selected from Higgin’s memoir to describe the soldiers’ experiences.
 

While the surface of a print is the conventional carrier of a photographic image, the quest of many artists is to challenge the assumption that it is the final point of production. Many photographers are working on the surface building on that thin layer of chemicals dried onto the paper, using processes and techniques to beautify, disfigure, or damage pre-existing images, and endow them with fresh identities. Many transformations are achieved through manual artisan skills, often worked by women. Hands get dirty, fingers pricked and cut by scissors and scalpels, eyes are strained in dark-rooms but all agree it is more satisfying than always working with keyboards and screens.

Veronica Bailey/ 4.1 Possible Danger / 4.2 A Purple Heart / 4.3 In Cold Blood /4.4 Blew in Half/ From the series Hermes Baby 2011/6.5cm x 9cm/Ilford Bromide Vintage B4-1P Unique hand-printed/Courtesy of the artist