Is this uncanny?

This experimental photo is part of my SIP assignment but I thought it may be uncanny because it is a photograph of a broadcast image (tv) and the person concerned did not know I was photographing them. That is all very postmodern in my opinion but does it constitute uncanny. Certainly a photograph is a mirror image.This first image is un-enhanced and in its raw state which I really quite like.



This image is enhanced and could be described as an uncanny double of itself maybe? I have been reading an essay by David Brittain called Uncanny Eden; the photography of Patrick Shanahan. It is interesting to note that Shanahan's work has developed from an interest in placelessness. Theorists have argued that the key condition of placelessness is the dissolution of fixed categories and boundaries in the environment and in culture generally. This clains Brittain, causes anxiety. Stemming from this notion Shanahan produced a series of photographs where he deliberately tried to provoke sensations of uncanniness. Brittain goes on to say,'At the beginning of the 20th century the uncanny was psychologized as one of a number of diseases associated with the effects of modernity. More recently theorists have returned to the uncanny to formulate aesthetic experience. (I am not as daft as I thought.)Freud theorized that mirrors, shadows and Doppelgangers were all likely to trigger uncanny sensations. He wrote that the child's invention of a double (like primitive man's animism) was a self-protective gesture, an assurance of immortality. Shanahan made a body of work called 'Personal Geography' which contains three images which evoke uncanny sensations. Two are of conventional beach scenes with the beach representing a liminal space somewhere between nature and culture. They have unnatural colours and black skies which would suggest nightime and yet they seem defined by a strange light. This effect has been caused by 'reciprocity failure' which often happens on long exposures. It is an uncanny effect whereby the negative chemically produces an unfamiliar double of itself. Blogger is not letting me upload any more images (?)but hopefully I can illustrate this in the next posting.