We use our hands to transform the world around us. They allow us to hold, build, repair and create. Through them, thoughts become things — a gesture becomes an object, an idea takes shape. We can hold a camera, press the shutter and capture a fragment of reality. But we can also return to the photograph afterwards and paint over it, write on it or draw across its surface. We can question what the image represents, but also what is left outside the frame.
Photography has always existed somewhere between technology and art. For much of its history, making an image meant working with physical materials — film, chemicals, photographic paper, light — and engaging in the slow rituals of the darkroom. The negative and, later, a photograph passed through the hands of its maker many times before reaching its final form. When the digital era took over, much of this process migrated to the computer screen. Photography became faster, more accessible and increasingly detached from the tactile gestures that had once given it life.
Today, many contemporary photographers seem to miss this physical relationship with the pictures. At a time when images are more often stored on hard drives than held in our hands, some artists feel the need to meet the image again as a material thing and modify its surface manually. These interventions do not reject photography as a medium, but acknowledge that the photograph alone is sometimes not enough.
Australian photographer Max Dupain drew a clear distinction between photography and painting. For him, photography was concerned with revealing the visible world, while painting offered the artist’s subjective interpretation of it. The contemporary artists discussed in this chapter choose to bring these two visual languages together. The photograph remains a record of reality, but painting, drawing or writing allows it to move beyond mere mimesis, opening up space for memory, imagination, emotion and myth.
Roland Barthes famously described photography through the concept of ça-a-été — ‘that-has-been’ — suggesting that every captured image carries the certainty that something once stood before the camera. Yet this certainty has its limits. A photograph may preserve a moment, but it cannot fully contain what was felt, thought or whispered. For the artists presented below, the physical interventions into the photographic image become ways of entering into dialogue with the medium, allowing it to speak about things that could not have been captured by the camera alone.
Vasantha Yogananthan. Hand-Coloured Myths
Painting plays a central role in expanding photography beyond the limits of documentary representation in A Myth of Two Souls, Vasanthas Yogananthan’s long-term project inspired by the ancient Hindu epic The Ramayana. Through this body of work, he creates a contemporary visual interpretation of a story deeply embedded in South Asian culture.
The artist photographs the landscapes associated with the mythical journey, portraying places, animals and people encountered during his travels, with local passersby posing for the images. All photographs were taken with a large-format camera and captured in black and white, before being transformed through the subtle traditional eighteenth-century hand-colouring technique. However, in some images — particularly those from the chapter Howling Winds — the intervention becomes more noticeable. This part of A Myth of Two Souls tells the story of Princess Sita being rescued by animals from across the world. Yogananthan photographed dogs, cats and monkeys encountered between Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu, then transformed them with colourful brushstrokes into creatures belonging to the realm of fairy tales and legend.
In Yogananthan’s work, the photograph remains rooted in a real encounter, yet the painted intervention opens it to imagination, cultural memory, and storytelling, introducing another layer of meaning and questioning the image’s claim to document reality.
Sonia Góral. Rewriting the Family Archive
Sonia Góral’s practice resonates with that of Vasantha Yogananthan, as in both cases the painted intervention gives form to something unphotographable. In her Family Album series, the Polish artist combines photographic prints with painting while working with her parents’ family archive. Góral couldn’t let go of the troubling fact that the pictures her father captured years ago preserve only his version of the past — one shaped not only by his perspective but also by the socially constructed image of the happy family. This point of view did not align with her own childhood memories of growing up in a toxic environment.
Unable to return to the past or recapture the events of her early years, Góral intervenes directly in the old photographs by inscribing her own emotional experience onto the prints through brushstrokes and layers of paint, covering large parts of the images. The resulting work becomes a meeting point for different ways of remembering. The artist doesn’t attempt to reconcile conflicting perspectives into one coherent truth. Instead, she aims to allow them to inhabit the same space while remaining in tension, creating a visual form of ‘agreeing to disagree.’
Reflecting on her mixed-media practice, the artist explains that she treats photography and painting ‘as complementary media that transform and destabilise one another.’ The added layer reveals emotions, tensions and experiences that existed beyond the visible.
Sara Skorgan Teigen. Sketching Beyond Representation
In Sara Skorgan Teigen’s practice, it is drawing that bridges the apparent finality of photographic representation with the invisible realm of inner experience. The sketchbook — central to her artistic process — functions as a site for open-ended experimentation, reflection and cross-dimensional storytelling. Through combining photography and drawing, the artist explores paths of perception and creation that would remain inaccessible within a single medium. Drawing becomes a way to unlock the hidden potential of photographs and reveal new layers of meaning — print, therefore, is just the beginning of a creative process.
For Skorgan Teigen, neither medium is superior to the other — they both feed off each other and merge into a new, sometimes unexpected quality. As the artist explains, ‘every medium and material carries with them a unique ability to understand something new.’ Similar to Sonia Góral, the additional layer does not replace photography but expands its emotional and conceptual possibilities. However, while Góral uses painting to confront and rewrite an existing family narrative, Skorgan Teigen uses drawing as a tool for exploration, allowing the image to move beyond what was immediately visible at the moment of capture.
The artist also explores another difference between the two media: photography is fast, collecting fragments of the world around us in a single moment, while drawing is slower, reflective, unfolding through time. Their combination creates a space between observation and imagination, opening up new worlds to discover.
Katarzyna Mazur. Photography and Belonging
Working with the archives of four families, including her own, Katarzyna Mazur explores how photography constructs identity and history. Like Sonia Góral, she begins with family photographs, yet instead of confronting personal memory through painted interventions, she questions the very mechanisms through which photographs shape identity and belonging.
In her project Edek’s Archive, the artist combines photographs from her grandfather’s collection with images from South Korean family archives (belonging to Haeun Lee, Nathalie Boseul Shin and Mare Yun) from a similar historical period. She chooses to deliberately confuse the viewer’s assumptions about each captured location by painting over selected negatives and prints and obscuring the faces that would normally help us recognise the cultural identity of those portrayed.
The drawing technique in this case investigates photography’s authority as a transparent record of reality and reveals the mechanisms through which photographs create categories of belonging. The archive, therefore, shifts from the realm of recorded truth into a space of uncertainty, where different narratives can coexist on a single plane. As the artist explains, she was curious whether these photographs could function outside their original family context and ‘open the way to a more speculative interpretation.’
During the development of the project, one of the archive owners described the experience as ‘working with ghosts’: many of the people in these photographs are no longer alive, and the images remain fragile traces of absent lives. Through her interventions, Mazur gives the archive a second life, allowing forgotten photographs to enter new conversations and acquire new meanings.
Shirin Neshat. Inscribing Identity
Shirin Neshat’s practice, on the other hand, demonstrates how adding another medium to photography can give a voice to what remains silent within the image itself. In her early series Unveiling (1993) and the later Women of Allah project (1993-1997), the artist combines black-and-white photographs of female figures with contemporary poetry written by Iranian women poets, inscribed directly onto the print’s surface. Drawing on the long tradition of Persian calligraphy, where text and visual art have existed next to each other, the written word becomes an equally important visual element within the work.
The photographic work reflects the artist’s attempt to understand the profound changes that took place in her country after the Islamic Revolution. The female body, the veil, the gun and the written word became elements through which she explores the relationship between femininity, power, religion and political identity. Placing poetry directly onto the visible parts of the female skin challenges the Western stereotype of the veiled woman as silent or passive. The text becomes a form of presence: a voice emerging from within the image.
In this case, the added layer offers space for the poets’ voices and a symbolic co-creation of meaning. The photograph remains connected to the reality of the portrayed body, yet the calligraphy introduces ambiguity and multiple possible interpretations. As the artist explains, her work exists between ‘fiction and truth, poetics and reality, and beauty and horror.’
Revealing the Invisible
Photography has always carried a unique promise: the ability to preserve a fragment of the world and confirm that something once existed in front of the camera. Yet the artists discussed here remind us that reality is never limited to what can be seen. A photograph may capture a face, a place or a moment, but it might not be able to fully contain the memories, myths, emotions or voices accompanying them.
Through paint, pencil, ink, and gesture, these artists reopen photographs that seemed already complete — and reveal their hidden layers. The captured image is no longer only a proof of what has been, but an open space where the invisible can continue to unfold.
