Atom, Planet: Cameraless Photography

While most photography employs a lens, and either film or a digital sensor, this series explores ways of generating images on photographic paper without using a camera or negative. I am inspired by the dialogue painters and sculptures have with their materials, and the way that interaction informs the resulting image. Another inspiration is the scientific method, where you observe phenomena, formulate a hypothesis, test it with experiments, use careful measurements, note variables, observe results; I then use this information to build an image.

Although still working with photo paper, light, and chemistry, I revisit some historic processes like Man Ray’s photogram, Pierre Cordier’s chemigram, and lumen printing, and also invent other ways of producing images without using a negative. These processes are utilizing optical situations, or chemical reactions, or a combination of the two. Applying glue as a resist and digging down to the photo paper surface with alternating photo chemicals causes an image to emerge on the paper in the form of a chemical painting. Some of these camera-less experiments include painting bleach onto blackened photo paper, building layered piles of glass and eggshells and moving around them with a flashlight to make an exposure, and growing a self-replicating garden of mold that feeds on silver gelatin paper. In one image, over 100 medicines, spices, and household cleaners were applied to photo paper and run through darkroom chemistry to test for colors and textures. The methods are an unorthodox collection of materials and techniques from the domestic and scientific realms, brought into the darkroom, often coaxing or scrubbing an image into the photographic paper. Some images are made in the dark and some in daylight, some processes are additive and others reductive, the result is a series of innovative photographs.

Photography is a very young and exciting medium, and there is so much undiscovered terrain. In some ways, it stands at a precipice: digital photography is eroding the availability of some analog materials, and the study and use of silver gelatin papers. Photographers have primarily used photo paper in the service of printing negatives made in cameras, but it has other interesting applications as an art material. I am working to develop these inventive processes, and to pose interesting questions about what photography is, and what it can be.

The imagery emerges as circles and spheres, representing planets and atoms, visualizing the macrocosm and the microcosm of life as we know it. My obsession with these forms has lasted 15 years, they are so much of what I see and experience. When I stand in the landscape, the horizon is a circle; when nature goes through four seasons and Spring comes again, that is a circle. Day begins again, circles are a constant experience, either spatially or temporally. For many years, I made self portraits with a camera, creating narrative images. With this abstract work, I am exploring the deeper story, the older story, the story of all of us, the story of atoms and planets, both circles—it is also an expression of my search for a sense of wholeness.