The Afterimage of Photography

The Afterimage of Photography Maaike Schoorel, Hilda, 2012. Oil and gold on canvas, 45x35cm. Courtesy of Maureen Paley

This is the second commission from our programme Developing Critical Writing on the contemporary visual arts. We asked three emerging writers to each write a piece about an artist of their choice. Here, Rowan Lear attempts to get inside the paintings of Maaike Schoorel.


The glistening gold canvas is hauntingly empty. As I watch, tiny smudges of pastel paint creep into vision. They slowly occupy the space, before quickening and forming connections.
Delicate layers materialise upon the surface. A line, a shadow, a shape, and finally a figure, emerge from the vacuum.

The long hair, shoulders, chin and other features of a young woman are delicately delineated – but only just. What I see in Hilda (2012) is familiar and strange, present and absent. I'm looking at a painting and yet what I've found is not unlike a photograph.

Maaike Schoorel's paintings are barely painted at all. Her method is painstaking and measured, but the finished white, black or gold canvases merely hint at their subject. The surface forms a kind of palimpsest, not yet overwritten, with the original layers of meaning and frames of reference imperfectly erased.

An analogy with popular conceptions of memory is easy to make, but it is what these paintings do to photography that intrigues me. Schoorel bases her paintings on photographs, modifying the colours and making only a few marks, leaving a tenuous but potent trace. It is within a state of tenuousness, writes Nicole Gringras in The Tenuous Image, that “the essence of the Photographic would be located: in this near nothing made visible, which, if one looks closely at it, appears and, in appearing, bespeaks our existence”.

Is it possible that an essence of photography might be revealed in painting? We perceive photography and painting very differently, in part because of assumptions about the processes involved. By painting from photographs, Schoorel manages to inhabit both these worlds.

Maaike Schoorel-install
Maaike Schoorel, Installation view at Chapter, Nothing Like Something Happens Anywhere. Credit: Phil Babot

With knowledge of their production I discover in her paintings both the authenticity of photography and the transformative power of painting. This marks a curious parallel with digital image-making – a technology-dependent medium that exists neither within the realm of painting or photography, but nevertheless disrupts the factitious boundary between the two.

Schoorel acknowledges the distinct cultural significances of each discipline, while providing possibility for a new kind of image. Unsurprisingly, these paintings don't translate well in digital or printed reproduction. The canvases really do look blank; without texture or depth. But in the flesh, the work invites what Laura U. Marks has called a “haptic visuality”.

Rather than relying on a separation between the viewing subject and the object, Schoorel's work encourages an active relationship with the tactility of the surface: I walk and look around the painting, seeking meaning and searching for the image which lingers beneath the surface.

Unlike most photographs, which are valued for their flat, transparent surfaces and their instantaneous delivery of information – often too much information – the paintings require time and texture to unfold. The act of looking becomes dynamic, durational, reflective and personal to each viewer.

An intense intimacy emanates from these paintings. The subdued palette and fragile figures are supported by the note of familiarity in the titles: 'Emma-Louise on her Bed'; 'Vrienden in Pradines'. Her subjects are her friends, family, and, occasionally, herself.

The spaces she depicts are domestic; correspondingly, the photographs from which the work is painted are personal and family snapshots. There is something peculiarly fitting about the act of painting that restores the personal connections in these kinds of pictures.

When Martha Langford critiqued artists' use of vernacular and snapshot photographs, she particularly deplored work that claimed artistic or documentary objectivity. She wrote that photography's “identity is improperly and unapologetically rooted in personal, present-based feelings and desires, the very opposite of Modernism's disinterest and universality, and just as foreign to Postmodernism's ironic corrections”.

Despite an ostensibly minimalist approach, Schoorel's paintings make no claim to universal objectivity, retaining a sense of a deeply private experience. Schoorel collapses the distance between herself and her subject in a way that is almost impossible with a camera and its lens. Her body is brought back into contact with the image through the application of paint, and thus back in touch with the body that she paints. 

My body is also engaged in this process, as I stand face-to-face with one of her portraits.  Her, and my, intimacy with her subject is manifold, even if it is barely visible.

Maaike Schoorel-install 3
Maaike Schoorel, Installation view at Chapter, Nothing Like Something Happens Anywhere. Credit: Phil Babot

In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes wrote “in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.” He desired to approach photography with complete subjectivity and attempted to silence the (cultural and political) noise of the photograph. But when I close my eyes I do not find silence, emptiness or even clarity. What I actually see is the impression of something visual; a temporary scarring of my retina; an image burned into my eyelids; an afterimage.

The picture I see is so slight that I can barely make it out, and it bears only a little resemblance to the scene in front of me. It is tinted by blood and my skin pigmentation; its colour is often a muted yellow or red pastel.

So when Barthes wrote, “I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am looking at”, he could easily have been describing the effect of Schoorel's barely-painted photographs: a faint but enduring trace of someone or something once seen before.

The flesh-marked canvasses have an aura of authenticity that relies less on fidelity to the originating image than fidelity to the viewer's own memory of similar events. What I really see is not mediated by the brush strokes of paint or the lens of a camera, but by the lens of my own eyes and my own mind. Schoorel's paintings haunt me as they haunt their photographs: they are the afterimage of photography.


Contributed by Rowan Lear

Rowan Lear is a writer, artist and filmmaker, currently based in Wales and studying for an MA in Photography: Contemporary Dialogues.  She was part of our programme: Developing critical writing on the contemporary visual arts in 2012, supported by the Arts Council of Wales.

Arts Council of Wales logoArts Council of Wales Lottery Funded logo