When is a photograph a photograph? Isn’t a sun-bleached patch of lawn actually also the result of a photographic process? When does a photo transpire? When a lens has opened and shut? Or at the moment an image first materializes in the developer? Possible ways of defining what a photo can be have become even more diverse since camera-produced digital images can be represented in binary codes and pixels. It looks like photography’s perennial crucial question: is that an analog or a digital image? is passé, outmoded at the very moment that “purely analog” or “definitely digital” ceased to say anything about the aesthetic quality of an image. In her three new series Equally, Laying and Still, artist Miriam Böhm superbly demonstrates that the historic techniques of collage and montage can be equal partners with their digital heirs, cutting and pasting. These techniques do not represent opposites; instead, they have all become tools for a wide-range of artistic practice that produces images on photographic paper.
