Joel Dixon (b. 1990, UK) studied BA Photography at the London College of Communication before relocating to Glasgow. In 2019 he was selected as one of the Royal Scottish Academy’s Residents for Scotland, and has exhibited with Street Level Photoworks and the Royal Scottish Academy. He is currently a student on the MA Photography programme at the Royal College of Art.
Through an engagement with materials, personal archives, and an accumulation of processes, Dixon’s practice centres the artist’s studio as a space of production and collaboration, and across different modes of working, it becomes an important site in which the history of portraiture can be interrogated.
In an essay titled ‘Informatic Opacity’ Zach Blas uses the term ‘autonomous visibilities’ to refer to visual models that allow individuals to oppose the modes of representation that, within digital surveillance and network technologies, seek to make a person fully intelligible and interpretable. It is this idea of retaining autonomy whilst remaining visible that, within the context of the history of photography, drives Dixon’s practice. PORTRAITS is a series of photographic works that engage with this history, playing with surfaces, layering, and abstraction to manipulate the image and how we interpret it.