Early in Catherine Yass’s career she made a serendipitous discovery. “I loaded the film wrong,” she says, “and [the negative] came out in different colors.” This happy accident led to what has become Yass’s signature technique, in which the photographer-filmmaker overlays a blue “negative” transparency (where light and dark are inverted on the negative of a photographic print) and a “positive” transparency (the normal form of a photographic image), each taken within a few minutes of the other. From this, she makes a large-scale composite print, usually displayed in a lightbox.

Catherine Yass, “Lighthouse (North),” 2011.

For her subject matter, Yass mostly focuses on empty interiors or architectural structures, producing uncanny images that capture time and space with increased depth and specificity. “We see [photos] as timeless, but I think with two exposures, you’re made aware of the time, because you see a movement between them,” Yass says. “I like the idea that you capture a kind of gap, which wasn’t caught on film. This gives the photos life. It also creates a disorienting space, because what’s far away starts to come out at you.”

Catherine Yass, “Lighthouse (North west),” 2011.

For her most recent project—on view at London’s Alison Jacques Gallery through February 11—Yass filmed and photographed the Royal Sovereign lighthouse, set six miles out to sea off England’s south coast. The work was conceived as a commission by the De La Warr Pavilion in East Sussex, located on the shore opposite the lighthouse. Yass was attracted to the precarious positioning of the nautical structure: a lighthouse balanced on the corner of a platform, which is balanced on a thick concrete post. She filmed it from various vantage points, both under and above water, with the aid of a helicopter, a fishing boat, and divers. The 12-minute film offers viewers an awe-inspiring visual portrait of the lighthouse, with upside-down and circular shots that conflate a longitudinal and latitudinal axis, or a linear space with an elliptical space. All the while, the color becomes more desaturated and the accompanying music more abstract.

Catherine Yass, “Lighthouse (East),” 2011.

In the same way that her photographs aim to capture the viewer’s “interior landscape,” this film attempts to “turn us inside out,” she says. Accompanying the film, the gallery will present never-before-seen “portraits” of the lighthouse, photographed intentionally into the sun to “suck in the light rather than give it out,” says Yass, who adds that her images reflect states of mind. Sigmund Freud would be pleased.

Catherine Yass
Title image: "Lighthouse (North)," detail. All images courtesy the artist and Alison Jacques Gallery, London.