Exhibition: Surface Tension

Photo Oxford is a biennial festival of exhibitions, workshops, talks, and other events that promote big ideas and current debates in photography. Featuring local, national and international photographers, Photo Oxford offers audiences moments of discovery and reflection, while providing photographers with opportunities to develop their practice and network.  The theme for the 2025 festival is 'Truth'.

About the exhibition:

Although long regarded as simply transparent to the things it depicts, photography is in fact a medium steeped in its own materiality. This exhibition features work by artists that reflects on, or creatively exploits, the peculiarities of photography’s various material substrates.

That work invites us to look through the photograph to its recording of a moment from the past even while drawing our eyes back to that photograph’s surface and the exigencies of its existence in the present. These are works that make us look at the photograph as much as through it and remind us that photographs are both objects and windows. In complicating photography’s transparency and its usual referential and temporal conventions, such photographs also cast doubt on the medium’s traditional truth claims. They highlight photography’s artifice. They make us question what we see and what we know. They make us ask what is true and what is not. They make us think.

With this self-reflexive thinking in mind, Surface Tension includes both historical and contemporary examples of photographs where artists have combined negatives, drawn, painted or scratched on their negatives, manipulated their emulsions in various ways, transmutated the photographic image from one medium into another, or simply set aside the camera to engineer a direct contact between the world and their photograph. In one way or another, they have all turned photography inside out. As critic Max Kozloff once wrote, ‘confronting such art, one is asked to judge, but cannot resolve, the conflict between the “transparency” of the photographic record and the way it has been undermined in such a fashion as to stress its object-like character’. This exhibition explores whether such an irresolution might allow these kinds of photograph to offer us different kinds of truths, including about the photographic medium itself.

This exhibtion is curated by Katy Barron, Geoffrey Batchen and Isabel Gregory.

How to visit:

The exhibition will be open daily from 25 October - 16 November 2025.

There will be two talks during the exhibition period:

• 'Rethinking the Photographic Document: Justine Varga in conversation with Isabel Gregory', 30 October 2025, 5pm.
• 'Photography and/as Music: Thomas Metcalf in conversation with Geoffrey Batchen', 13 November, 5pm.