Sofia Borges - The Swamp - 2016

Winner Mack First Photobook 2016

"Reality as mud as dense as air” reads the spine of Sofia Borge’s book The Swamp, and equally, the series of photographs that she presents is as leaden as it is impenetrable. Spanning a seven-year period, it largely records Borges’ countless visits to natural history museums, zoos, aquariums and research centres where the artifice of reality became her point of focus. For Borges, displays such as dioramas serve as the ultimate form of representation, where objects have the virtuous task of representing “themselves” – a type, genre or group that is inherently bound to language through layers of history and meaning. As a motionless walrus lies in its plastic Antarctic locale and the beady eye of a fossilised bird catches your glance, what glares back at you from the depths of The Swamp is not the thing itself, but the image, of an image, of an image.