The Merits of Tracer Fire (2020)

“‘It’s a cacophony of trying the impossible and that is to photograph the internet with a Polaroid camera which cannot focus or compose (what I see in the viewfinder is very different to what I get.’ When I look at Dragana Jurisic’s The Merits of Tracer Fire images (albeit, a digital scan of some of the polaroids she has emailed to me) I feel moved by an enormous and perpetuating tension at work in these tiny objects. This tension, of course, is between the codes of the Polaroid and the codes of online, of which these images are a simultaneous trace. Online we relinquish control passively, half-aware if aware at all of what we are leaving unknown. Jurisic’s Polaroids are, rather, an active relinquishing. They feel like a turning-inside-out, a through-the-looking-glass vision, wherein the familiar is made strange and, therefore, newly visible as against our new sense of its strangeness we try to decode it.

That the portraits, especially, are so unnerving isn’t just down to the blurring of half-familiar facial features, the disorientating truncation of spaces and body parts, the deepened shadows about eyes brought out by the development. Many of these faces seem themselves startled by their own defamiliarization, snatched from the gush and churn of moving images online. Like photographs of ghosts, moreover, they startle us with an ambiguous suggestion of what may be there that we don’t normally see.

Un-manipulatable, a Polaroid, in one sense, ‘speaks the truth’. But they don’t look real. Dreamlike, they are something entirely other to the aspiration toward hyperreal imaging on our latest digital devices. They embody a reminder of their unreality, their detachment from their subject, at tension always with the fact of their physical trace, connection thereto. Jurisic’s images are the epitome of the uncanny. I feel both closer to and farther away from the details of a familiar online territory, alienated by fragmentation and blurring, isolating and silencing. Suddenly aware of my floundering effort to read, I feel put-out from my everyday shelters of code.

These images represent a warped translation of the supposed public realm into a document heavy with privacy, of digital illusions and social constructions into index, a code of touch, echo and haunting, that all the same undermines their reality. As such, performing the tracer fire of our life online and the social textures reinforced there, they amplify the uncanny impossibilities of translation, the disjunction, shadows, losses and longings between one code and another, and our ultimate craving to touch for what’s real.” (Susanna Galbraith)