About Victoria Jenkins
Victoria Jenkins is a photographer currently based in the East Midlands. She received her BA (Hons) in Photography from the University of Brighton in 2009. Her work has been exhibited in the UK and abroad and has been published in a variety of media, including Wallpaper and SeeSaw Magazine.
About the project ‘Images from the Archives of the Institute of Esoteric Research’
A unique characteristic of photography has been its ability to record the visible, material world, its perceived objectivity and accuracy has lead to a utilitarian application of the camera as a tool for documentation, and this can be traced back to photography’s early history. Parallel to this is a history that echoes with illusion and
trickery; photography carries a false empiricism, for which we may allow our guard to be dropped.
The photographs presented in Images from the Archives of the Institute of Esoteric Research are rooted in the language of rational investigation, employing quasi-scientific laboratory style conditions in to which a series of still lives, fictional archival images, are constructed. A commingling of varied sources occurs: vernacular imagery of magic tricks, home science experiments, divination practice, superstitious belief and forensic investigation. The intent is to play on the conflicts in the languages that are being appropriated: logic and absurdity, revelation and trickery, illustration and illusion, but also that which seems concurrent despite the apparent polarities: the image whose authority is asserted through a shrouding in secret language and gesture. This collision and coinciding intends to produce a series riddled with ambiguities, the oblique amongst clarity providing a slippery surface on which to form the photographs narratives.
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