Subject Failure

Subject Failure
Shaun Waugh
with essays by Emma Ng, Marcus Moore, and Matt Plummer
& Alice Tappenden.

Shaun Waugh is a New Zealand-based artist who lives and works in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. His work centres on the material culture of photographic history, critically
examining the complex relationship between images and the realities they aim to depict.
Waugh highlights how photography can deceive, reduce, and seduce, to question the authenticity of photographic representations.

Working primarily with the complexities of colour control in photographic printing processes, Waugh explores and expands the artistic and technical potentials of the medium.
Avoiding arbitrary definitions in favour of interdisciplinary tendencies, his practice exploits the tension between image and object-making — pitching his chromatically driven work into an uncertain terrain between photography, painting, and sculpture.
In this first monograph on Waugh’s work, Subject Failure is constructed chromatically, arranging elements from a variety of projects spanning the last 15 years. The essence of photographic colour — red, green, blue, greyscale, yellow —
become the building blocks of the book.

“When a child wriggles or a leaf moves in the wind and the camera does not manage to still the blur, photographers call it ‘subject failure.’” Waugh has co-opted this term as the title of this artist book to ask one of photography’s deepest questions: Can we trust the medium to capture what we see, and what does this reveal about our relationship with reality? Not just a photographer, Waugh is a historian, philosopher, and trickster — inviting viewers to ponder the past, present, and future of the technologies we use to reproduce our world.

Richly illustrated with over 80 images arranged to emphasise Waugh’s reflexive use of colour, Subject Failure features new essays by Emma Ng, Marcus Moore, and Matt Plummer & Alice Tappenden, who each offer insights into Waugh’s
engaging conceptual practice.