Susannah Douglas: In Conversation

Sara Jaspan

Susannah Douglas makes small drawings in pencil and ink working from amateur photographs and videos sourced from the internet. Her practice is concerned with how people seek to capture personal memories through creating and featuring in such images and films, alongside the generic tropes and conventions they often fall into and the significance of their online proliferation. Here, Sara Jaspan speaks to the artist about her current exhibition ‘Video Stills’, which runs at PAPER in Manchester until 11 April.

Sara Jaspan: I understand this new body of work began in response to an image you came across in a stack of discarded family photographs of someone dressed up as a Disney character. What interested you about this image and how did it develop outward into the body of work you’ll be showing as part of Video Stills at PAPER? 

Susannah Douglas: My work tends to focus on people’s attempts to capture unique experiences and personal memories through images – to create a visual history that confirms a sense of individual identity – combined with how these images often fall into certain generic types; a class photo, a pose on a beach or in front of a sunset, for example.

That’s what drove me to the Disney photograph; I felt it looked a little bit the same. Mickey, Minnie, Goofy; they all started as drawings and now there are standardised representations of them everywhere, in 2D and 3D, which are constantly multiplying. The photograph of the person dressed as Mickey seemed almost like the simplest form of this: attempting to become something that was pure representation in the first place. It made me wonder whether in representing ourselves we want to be like those Disney character images, in a way. We want that unique moment but also to conform – to just tick that box a little bit – like there’s some sort of security in that. 

SJ: To what extent do you think is this new? 

SD: The desire to present a certain visual image of ourselves has existed for a long time. Before photography, classical portraits did the same thing – they all followed a certain pattern or set of conventions and were used to represent particular ideals, aspirations, and people’s place in society. Today, this has simply become more widespread; propelled and democratised by the internet and social media. There’s also maybe more of a false promise that those images can actually do or mean something when, in fact, once they’ve been shared multiple times online, they start to lose their personal attachments and become anonymous. They become even more empty, purely image-based representations; a series of customary poses no longer linked to anything in the original experience. The personal narrative becomes disconnected and lost.

For Mickey Mouse, that’s fine. He’s gained traction through repetition. But for the person trying to represent their identity or sense of self through the photograph; once it’s been put out there publicly and shared multiple times, it becomes this quite basic degraded copy of the original thing.

SJ: Why do you think we feel so compelled to share images of ourselves and our experiences online?

SD: I’m grappling quite a lot with that at the moment and whether it should be relevant within the drawings. I mean, it’s important that the work is dealing with images and videos that have been shared via the internet, widely reproduced or distributed. Taking a photo for your mantlepiece at home is very different to wanting one to post on Facebook, Instagram or YouTube. I am interested in the motivation to put images up publicly and how they become very deliberate representations, but more so in what happens to the image itself once this occurs: how it becomes detached from any original motivation and starts to take on its own trajectory, out of the ownership of the subject/author and into the hands of the viewer.

SJ: What impact do you think has the arrival of photography, the internet and social media had on our sense of identity or self?

SD: I think the internet and the media have commodified identity and made it into something we feel a need to acquire and trade upon. Photographs develop a value beyond the personal once shared online because then they represent some kind of desire; to outwardly project having or being something. Social media works on people aspiring to certain images, who want to become those images.

SJ: There’s also an unsettling element of voyeurism within all this – both in terms of how images are consumed online and how your drawings present us with snapshots from the lives of people we’re unlikely to have met or share a personal connection with.  

SD: Definitely. Images and videos are shared online to be looked at, so voyeurism is inherently being requested, so far as I can tell. And yes, I do find that very unsettling. I think it relates to a need to have the validity of our experience or identity represented and confirmed.

SJ: Voyeurism has a violent connotation, but your decision to take these ‘emptied’ images offline and invest time, care and meaning in them through drawing also seems very tender.

SD: There’s something a little bit memento mori about a photograph. I think it’s in On Photography that Susan Sontag talks about how photos bring us closer to death – as soon as the image is taken, the moment has passed. It instantly becomes closed and nostalgic. There’s a sense of desperation in trying to hold on to a moment by taking an image of it and how that almost takes us further away from it.

So yes, spending time turning these images into drawing does involve an element of tenderness. Not necessarily for the specifics of each image – I’m not trying to return meaning to them – but for that idea of a photograph in itself, as something almost quite sad, quite lost.

SJ: Is there any further reason behind why you choose to re-present them through drawing?

SD: Yes, it relates to the process that goes into creating these images in the first place. Adopting a quick pose for the camera can seem very instant, natural and un-thought-out, but it’s informed by so much: the cultural context out of which it developed, the situation that prompted the person to adopt it, the ideas and values it conveys, the intention for it to be seen and recognised online. These factors form the scaffold behind each image. Similarly, photos themselves have become throwaway: we take ten and delete nine, keeping the one that ‘works’. The whole thing is very contrived.

For me, drawing mimics this process to some degree – re-presenting an image that was pure representation in the first place and reflecting the true amount of time and labour involved. The process becomes their reality, which is just one of construction.

SJ: Does the work contain any other element of intervention, in addition to transcribing the images into drawings?

SD: Yes, the body of work I’m planning to show at PAPER includes a group of ‘layered images’. These are drawings based on images that I’ve created through photocopying, cropping or splicing to look like video stills taken at the moment when two images merge and momentarily sit on top of each other creating this multiple exposure. Other drawings in the show are based on single stills but where I’ve rubbed lines or sections out. Or I’ve used stills from videos shot in landscape but displayed in portrait on a smaller scale camera phone. Similarly, some of the colour drawings have been made just using blue and yellow to make them appear more saturated, like when your printer runs out of colour balance and you don’t have any pinks in it.

These are all interruptions that I’ve added myself and are to do with a balance between control and lack of. You can spend ages trying to compose and capture the perfect image, but disintegration occurs each time it is shared and replicated; both in a material sense and how it becomes an increasingly degraded copy of the original experience.

SJ: Where do you see your practice heading next?

SD: ‘Video Stills’ is very much part of a body of work that’s in progress and contains ideas that are still being worked through. For me, the process of drawing tends to lead to more questions rather arriving at final answers. At present I am thinking more about developing the process and technique, continuing to explore colour/ink and loosening up some of the pencil work and the defined edges.

‘Video Stills’ by Susannah Douglas runs at PAPER in Manchester until 11 April.