The Bounded and the Synoptic: The Archive and Photographic Appropriation

Mick Finch’s body of digital collages, entitled The Book of Knowledge, explores the transcription and ordering of photographic elements to question the potential signs and power relationships of images. Finch takes photographic sources from the post-war encyclopaedia The Book of Knowledge and digitally rearranges and resettles them into forms that subvert the original aspirational and prejudiced views they presented. This method of adjusting the potential cultural meaning of images through their transmission and migration to other states takes inspiration from Aby Warburg’s (1866-1929) photographic displays, which mapped relationships between works of art as a means of drawing attention to movement between pagan and renaissance cultures. Finch’s digital flattening of his manipulated photographic representations brings about a metaphorical flattening of any potential hierarchy of orders they may suggest. This approach has parallels to the flatbed picture plane on which rearrangements of thoughts can adhere.