Pictures at a Remove: Seth’s Drawn Photographs

This chapter closely examines Seth’s drawn photographs, comparing the ways in which comics and photography relate to their represented realities in terms of time, narrative, duration, and framing. Seth’s drawn photographs synthesize these complicated temporal relations in metapictures that invite the reader to consider the nature of visual mediation. These metapictures are caught between the subjective and objective, the atomized and continuous, the opaque and transparent, the classical and grotesque, the absent and present. At the seat of these tensions is an ambivalent relationship to the (historical) referent, inherent in the photographic perspective and amplified by Seth’s drawing. In their extreme reticence – an uncommon synthesis of photographic and cartoon stillnesses – Seth’s drawn photographs exemplify his method of compelling the reader to take a position between history and memory in order to make sense of images.