dr. Dominique Somers

Dominique Somers’ artistic practice can be characterized as a form of research photography, in which she probes into automated image processes, conditions of artificially induced visibility, and the making manifest of phenomena that are inaccessible to the naked eye (the flash exposure, the radioactive image, atomic and cosmic events). She studies experimentally how technical images give rise to new insights and aesthetic experiences that find their way into our everyday lives, ways of thinking and visual processes.

She has a soft spot for acheiropoietic phenomena: imprints created by light that are essentially created without the aid of a device or human intervention – nuclear shadow images, photograms of electric sparks, the formation of Lichtenberg figures and fulgurites by lightning strikes. Somers is interested in how these phenomena relate to historical and current theories about the photographic condition and about image-making in general.

She often employs a trial-and-error way of working by initiating speculative experiments without a predetermined outcome in mind. To this end, she collaborates with scientific research laboratories that grant her access to their high-tech infrastructures and test sites. It’s her way of not only challenging the role of the artist as author but also questioning the ways in which we, as a culture, interact with technological media and with images that manifest in unforeseen or inexplicable ways.

In 2021 Dominique Somers obtained a PhD in the Arts at KASK Ghent/Ghent University. In her doctoral research project entitled ‘Everything that Shines Sees’, she explored how the event, the technology and the phenomenon of flashlight in photography have contributed to the formation of a modern understanding of vision and to the articulation of perception as a cultural concept.