Liminal Vestiges investigates the ontological and phenomenological intersections of space, memory, and material decay. Racheal Samuels’ photographs present a nuanced exploration of post-industrial and urban environments through the lens of absence and residual human presence. Her practice, grounded in the documentary tradition yet saturated with a distinctly poetic vision, engages with the afterlives of architecture—the way space continues to hold meaning beyond its functional purpose.

Samuels’ approach is both formal and conceptual. The framing, composition, and use of analog and digital technologies foreground the act of seeing as a process of historical inquiry. The use of medium format photography, in particular, enhances the materiality of surface and the tactile tension between permanence and entropy. These images do not merely depict abandoned sites—they embody what anthropologist Tim Ingold describes as “being with things”: a relational immersion that refuses to separate human history from the material traces it leaves behind.

Within these liminal environments—neither fully occupied nor completely abandoned—the viewer encounters a form of spatial haunting. These are sites of spectral presence, where the politics of labor, memory, and architecture intersect. By removing the figure yet retaining its imprint, Samuels prompts a reading of the space itself as a kind of archive: layered, unsettled, and open to interpretation.

Her work dialogues with the visual language of the New Topographics movement and the contemporary aesthetics of ruination, while rejecting spectacle in favour of quiet resonance. In Liminal Vestiges, photography functions not as passive witness, but as an active agent of remembrance and re-seeing.

Biography

Racheal Samuels is a photographer exploring liminal and abandoned spaces through digital and slide film. Influenced by Richard Misrach, her work reveals traces of human presence in industrial and urban environments, where absence speaks as powerfully as presence. Based on Norfolk Island, she draws on experience in film, installation, and darkroom practice to create poetic, eerie images rooted in memory, light, and the quiet architecture of place.