Sensing Matter: From the Infra-thin to the Photographic Object

Sensing Matter presents a selection of works examining materiality and objecthood, organised as a study in perception and encounter. Moving from barely visible vapours and light sensitivities to images which step away from the wall to encroach into physical space as objects, the exhibition studies elements of the photographic image which are often out of view: apparition-like moments of invention and production, and the transformations and afterlives of images: as both residues and ongoing potentialities.  

As photography remains pulled between the extremes of a supposedly weightless transmissibility and a presence that is often associated with nostalgia or redundancy, a central proposition of the exhibition is to think the photographic through Marcel Duchamp’s notes on the infra-thin: a subtle but sensitive communicative frequency which hovers on the threshold of perceptibility. The infra-thin may be hard to pin down, but it can be understood through specific examples given by Duchamp: for example the warmth of a seat (which has just been left); the whistling sound of velvet trousers; or the difference in dimensions between two mass-produced objects from the same mould. As Marjorie Perloff suggests, the infra-thin is in some ways a study of differences in a domain of similarities, and it is also a study of frequencies and sensitivities. In their experiments with what a photograph can do or be, the works in the exhibition test the parameters of a familiar medium. They move from record to catalyst, from historicity to possibility. In so doing they invoke many Duchampian motifs: vapours and gases, shadows and refractions, doubles, chance and accident.  

About the curator: Duncan Wooldridge is an artist and writer, and is Reader in Photography in the School of Digital Arts, Manchester School of Art, MMU. His research spans photographic materiality, experimental photography and conceptual art, the photograph’s future tense, and the stickiness of images. He is the author of ‘To Be Determined: Photography and the Future’ (2021, SPBH/MACK), and the co-editor with Lucy Soutter of ‘The Routledge Companion to Global Photographies’ (2025, Routledge) and ‘Writer Conversations’ (2023, 1000 Words), as well as the editor with Ana Casas Broda and Anshika Varma of ‘Photobook Conversations’ (2025, 1000 Words) and the forthcoming ‘Written Up/Written Down: The Selected Writing of John Hilliard (2026, MACK).