Studio practice workbook 4.

East facing room of the Priory

This is my intention within my current studio practise: to extend the viewer’s perception of time beyond the everyday norm through the technique of extreme long exposure photographs. However, whether I have succeeded or not in this task seems to me to have become eclipsed by the often unexpected results. The worked-on images that have eventually appeared on my monitor (to my mind somehow like they mysteriously do in the chemical tray to the Darkroom Developer) often resemble nothing like my pre-visualisation. Dark and foggy exposures, unusual distortions, inexplicable farfopteros; I am often at a loss to explain where and how an image was made.

Something else takes over as the core aesthetic of the image. They seem inhabited by an atmosphere or mood. I was asked if any of the images I made in the long disused Priory showed ghosts. ‘All of them,’ I replied. Each image is a raft of unanswered questions. There has been a continuing discussion among my friends whether the images are more successful as artworks if each is presented with an explanation of where it depicts and what it is about or whether the image itself should be able to stand alone. I cannot commit myself to an answer either way.

I once attended a workshop run by a digital photographer who showed us his method for creating his award winning atmospheric landscapes. He added layer upon subtle layer of textures onto his images. A touch of tree bark, a shimmer of lace, toned down and washed out. I felt that his work was fakery and was unimpressed by the images. With these solargraphs, however, the atmospheric effects come unbidden and without my intention to add effects. The process gives equal opportunities to serendipitous enhancement as to unfortunate spoilage and it is left to me to choose which is which.

I should mention at this point my relationship with serendipity. I believe that it can be used as a method. When working with known qualities and proven formula the result will probably be predictable, which may not be a good thing. If one stirs it up and adds some randomness, one may have to work like hell to salvage the whole mess. It is between the gaps in the creaking structure that one allows something unexpected and possibly brilliant into the creation. In my experience of theatre studies, groups would often be called. The cool and clever invariably got together and produced predictably cool and clever results. I learned to wait until there were only the unconfident and the misfits left to make the last group and I would join them. This is the group that I thought had a chance to produce something unpredictable and possibly astounding.

Axel with box of pinhole cameras

One aspect of working on a project that involves such long time frames is that it is difficult to make developments within a shorter time frame. That is the predicament I found myself in this year when I decided to use solargraphy as my subject for studio practise. In some respects it was an easy choice. I had begun work on it a year previously so was already well involved. More importantly, I was still fascinated by the process and eager to explore it further. At one point I thought I might have it a bit too easy; I was sitting back while my cameras were out in the world working while other students were busy worrying about studio time and finding models. I realised my folly when it was time for me to evaluate my work so far in order to develop it further. If I processed my images early I was missing out on months of exposure time and possibly wasting the months that had gone into them so far. It became a compromise. I brought in cameras that may not have been fully ‘cooked’ and used the results to inform the sets of shorter term cameras that I set out. I found my direction moving from an interest in pure landscape and sky images to more subject orientated ones.

At this time I was also becoming frustrated with technical issues. The new high resolution Epson V30 scanner I had bought was not performing well. The images appeared with coloured bands across them. The cause puzzled me but I now think that it happened because the buffer filled in the scanner memory causing it to pause a number of times mid scan, each pause created a band. I returned to my original scanner but was not sure what to make of the images 'damaged' by faulty scans.

East facing balcony

Water of Leith, Anzac Ave bridge

Eventually, with the encouragement of my supervisor Rachel Gillies, I began to see these 'glitched' images as being interesting in themselves and chose to include some of them in the show.

Studio practice workbook 3.

Port Chalmers

The ‘moment’ is a usefully vague measurement of time. It is used to represent an unspecified short period of time. Perhaps it represents a period of no-time, when human time stops long enough to comprehend something happening. “I was thinking of something else for a moment”, one might say. Something that happens at a speed faster than can be grasped such as the ‘click’ of a camera shutter opening and closing can occur within a moment. An experienced photographer listening to the click might tell you accurately the length of time the shutter was open but for most this would be a mere technicality. A moment is a subjective measurement. If the four and a half billion years of earth’s existence was not experienced on human terms, can we say that it passed in a moment?

Solargraphy is evidence of a photographic moment that extends beyond normal conventions. Each clear day adds another growth ring to the concentric series of arcs marking the sun’s path. A season or two or three will fill the sky with these luminous intermittent bands. For us the time period that is covered might include hundreds of mundane work days, unexpected life changing events, long awaited news but for the camera it might as well be a click. That moment, fixed as an image on paper, is a view outside of the limits of our perception of time.

Careys Bay

Cameras are machines that extend our perception into realms that were not previously accessible. Muybridge’s images froze human and animal movement and allowed for the first time detailed analysis of such things as the mechanics of a horses gait when trotting or galloping. Harold Edgerton’s 1964 photograph “Shooting an apple” surprisingly shows apple matter exploding from both entry and exit directions. So familiar that they become clichéd are the long-exposure photographs of the light trails left by cars at night or else the circular trails of stars as the night sky rotates around the pole. Solargraphy takes long exposure technique to a new extreme so that the photographic moment takes place over months. The viewer can enter this extended moment and perceive the world in these terms.

View of Goat and Quarantine Islands

Studio practice workbook 2.

1952 Commer 15 CWT

Finished and printed solargraphs do have a tendency to take on some characteristics of the battered, hard worn photographic paper. The process of enlargement makes the grain of the paper more prominent. The dust and water, flaws and distortions are all very apparent. The originators of the technique coined the term “Farfopteros” to describe the detritus that finds it’s unlikely way into the camera via the pinhole. The name might read better in Spanish but the idea is universal. That isn’t the only unpredictable aspect to image making this way. The pinhole is itself a unique and critical construction. Machine made pinholes are available, pressed with superfine accuracy. I prefer to make them myself using thick aluminium foil and a thin needle. I use fine sand paper to take off the burrs that may or may not exist beyond the limits of my eyesight. Imperfections that result from this handcrafting have a bearing on the image . Some cameras will make sharper images than others, all of them are unique to their maker.

Composing the image is the joyous part. Perhaps there are endorphins that are released when one is in the creative zone. I find the world transformed and that I’m surrounded by beauty at these times. This may essentially be the reason why I attempt art at all.

I took notice of the description by Marc Anton Gaudin, one of the first Daguerreotypists, of the excitement caused by the ‘gift to the world’ upon the release of Daguerre’s photographic method. “Each of us wanted to copy the view from our windows. Fortunate indeed was the man who on the first attempt obtained a silhouette of roofs against the sky: he went into ecstasies over chimney-pots”

Negative images on photographic paper - as scanned

Studio practice workbook 1.

These blog entries represent the workbook of my studio practice leading towards MOMENT, an exhibition of Solargraphy, opening at the Temple Gallery on 21 June 2010. This is the final part of my Graduate Diploma in Fine Arts at the Otago Polytechnic School of Art.

In 2000 solargraphy was developed in Szczecin, Poland by Diego Lopez Calvin, Slawek Decyk and Pawel Kula - known as Team Solaris. Their idea was to create an international project for people around the world to collaboratively make simultaneous solargraphic images. I first came across solargraphy through the amusing and enthusiastic pinhole and solargraphy work of UK based Justin Quinell.
http://www.pinholephotography.org/

I have had some correspondence with Diego López Calvín who has been supportive without giving away the techniques he uses to create his superb colours.

The technique for solargraphy is that a pinhole camera is constructed and loaded with photosensitive paper. The camera is positioned where it can view the subject, which should include the path of the sun, and will not be disturbed. The aperture is opened and the camera is left untouched for days, weeks or months. The usual practice in pinhole photography is to expose for seconds or minutes and then in the darkroom process the paper normally. That is to develop and fix the image.  The technique used in solargraphy is somewhat different. Since the images are exposed for such extreme lengths of time the usual photochemical process is altered. The negative image becomes visible on the photographic paper without the need of chemical processing. In fact, my own experimental attempts to develop and fix solargraphic prints were unsuccessful. My results were either blackened images from the developer or completely faded images from the fix. Solargraphic practice is to remove the photographic paper from the camera under safelight conditions and scan it directly to a computer. The light from the scanner will degrade and “fog” the original image simultaneously as it is scanned. With each successive scan the image will lose definition. This means that there is only one chance to get the best possible image transferred to the computer and the original will be destroyed. Once the image is scanned and loaded into a photo editing program, it is inverted positive to negative and flipped left to right. Various adjustments are made to contrast and colour according to the whim of the artist. I see this part of the process as where much of the artistry as opposed to technique takes place. 

The process, then, is something of a hybrid of new and old. Lensless photography using a light sensitive medium is a technique from photography’s earliest days, although the light sensitive emulsion used these days is the result of a century and a half of development. The digitising of the image is of course a relatively recent innovation. It is this that makes the solargraphy technique possible. Digitisation makes it easy to handle, manipulate and print many copies of an image.

A fundamental difference solargraphy has to other photography methods is the destruction of the original work in the process of realising the desired image. The little black package that was the camera may have spent three seasons held to the discreet corner of a wall by the chemical faith of double-sided sticky tape. The camera, usually made in batches of dozens, might not have cost much in materials and time to construct but it gains value by it’s sheer good fortune and longevity. A steady stint will pay off in light absorbed and information collected. The reward to the photographer, if he has composed his shot well, can be immense. Of course many cameras don’t make it home and some philosophising over loss and attachment is sometimes called for during their harvesting. There is also plenty of room for misadventure in the rest of the process of digitisation. A mis-scan can easily ruin the result of half a year’s work.

Once the photochemical pattern is transduced into binary code the original paper will become useless. If the act of creation is related to destruction, as in “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette”. The sacrifice has been made and the equation is seemingly complete.

More later

Easter Airshow at Wanaka

Some shots from the motorbike trip with Steve and James to the Warbirds show in April.

BELOVED

BelovedArt School students visit DPAG

I visited this exhibition last Monday. Because of the restriction on photography I sketched in the gallery and added colours later. Of course I couldn’t restrict myself to a single piece so I’m going to comment on several that stand out as having some sort of relevance to my practise.

Milan Mrkursich

Construction on Red (1982)

I was immediately drawn to this work because of geometrical similarities with my pinhole solagraphs. There is the arc reaching out of the corner like the arc of the sun, the strong red ground and most prominently the skewed presentation of the canvas. These elements are all in my work also (though the skewed horizon in my work might not be so intentional). Mrkursich appears to me to be displaying a strong independent vision, abstract but highly structured. My solagraph work hovers somewhere in the abstract/representational borderlands so I am happy to make connections with Constructions on Red.

Blaise Desgoffe

Still Life (1925)

This is a masterly study of materialities. Degoff’s arrangement has reproduced the glint of burnished brass, the dull reflection of pewter, the translucence of marble etc. At the centre of this work is a small glass bust with the light entering through the back of the head and radiating a soft diffuse gleam from the face.

There is no direct relevance to specific work of mine but it seems to me to be a challenge to all photography to try to match this subtle understanding of how light plays.

JMW Turner

Dunstonborough Castle, Northumberland (1799)

I am very much a Turnerist. Whenever I have the opportunity I attempt to photograph landscapes as ferocious, awful and romantic as is this. Turner was a young man when he painted this and perhaps it shows in the less than subtle (absurdly huge?) waves endangering the boats in the midground. I also see terrible beauty in the world and seek ways to overwhelm the viewer with it.

André Derain

Un Paysage (1920?)

This is another sort of landscape, one that is soft, comfortable and easy to slip into. Although it is very much Of France it’s warm hues resemble central Otago and it is really only given away by the medieval village in the midground.

I have a vague yearning to live in a world as lovely. Creating a seductive landscape like this is an alternative to inhabiting or possessing it.

Colin McCahon

The Five Wounds of Christ, No.3 (1977-78)

This is a huge work, physically, metaphorically and emotionally. I also read this one as a landscape but unlike most landscapes, which are externalisations of the artist’s inner world, McCahon seems to bring a sort of geographical presence into his passionate vision.

Where this intersects with my practise I can’t say.

Q:Should one aspire to creating work this powerful?

Just let me keep making pretty pictures.