Text - Equivalence
- Wilsons Promontory - 2006 - © Lloyd Godman
The Force that Feeds Us - Lloyd Godman - 2005
Like the form of
a body unclothed, light is quintessential, in every manifestation elegance
is drawn from a dark void.
Photographers are
acquiescent to this ultimate force. From a profusion of energy speeding
past a planet suspended in a vast space, these small, humble creatures
- photographers - use recording devices to capture infinitesimal degrees
of electromagnetic radiation and create images of their world. There
is ritual in their methods - of looking at light, of waiting for light,
of chasing light, of constructing with light – and even cursing
the light. Their medium demands looking critically with an eye of sensitivity
to the force that propels the medium.
Photo-archetype relies on light - images are formed by modulations of
light that project onto the sensitive emulsion or receiver. While each
image carries a presence of light related to the subject, there is a
correspondence to the absence of light that was absorbed- retained by
the subject, or reflected faster than a bullet into an adjacent space
- this is what forms a recognizable image – disparity - difference
– variation in light. As photographers, light is the force that
feeds us, it is an intermediary between the tactile physical dimension
of subject and its loss of this dimension in a visual representation.
For centuries,
light has intrigued artists. While painters use various strategies to
simulate light photographers work directly with the source. For photographers
variations in the quality, colour, intensity and direction of light
are the essence of their medium - a rich, thick pigment in a tube waiting
to be squeezed out. When we look to the history of photography, light
has been used not only to reveal a subject but as subject in itself.
Fox Talbot’s
statement to the Royal Society on 31 January 1839 ... “I do not
profess to have perfected an art but to have commenced one, the limits
of which it is not possible at present exactly to ascertain. I only
claim to have based this art on a secure foundation." suggests
the boundaries of the medium may always be open.
Besides the photographs
we produce, light feeds an inimitable force.
In this statement - “Now - light where it exists - can exert an
action, and in certain circumstances does exert one sufficient to cause
changes in material bodies”. Fox Talbot 1834 - he suggests there
are processes with even greater gravity than the potent photographic
medium we take for granted. This carefully worded statement is beyond
both Fox Talbot the artist and scientist – it is all encompassing
- it steps beyond the Art he helped invent, and references material
bodies greater than thin sheets of film or paper.
Of course a greater
gravity is photosynthesis - the utilization of light by plants to expand
their cells and grow into the most extraordinary forms we often take
for granted. The elegance of the photosynthetic process is veiled by
the visual – the diversity of textures, forms, colours etc. they
have evolved to take. There are structures behind the facade sense of
beauty in nature - it is plants that are responsible for all the food
we eat, many of the natural resources we consume and the processes that
keep the planet sustained.
While finely crafted
photographs encompass an inspiring aesthetic sense of beauty - the subtle
delicacy of tones in a silver gelatin print, the vibrant rich colours
of C-types and Cibachrome , the seductive velvet of pigment prints etc.
- plants and photosynthesis are consummate in elegance, grace, and style
- the process is simply inexplicable in its delicacy, intricacy and
wonder.
Surprisingly, the
process of photosynthesis, where by plants utilize the energy from the
sun to grow is not dissimilar to the way silver halide particles grow
when exposed to light and are then developed. The ancients worshiped
light and the life it brought; they understood the relationship of light
from the sun, the seasons and the relationship with plants. For them
the summer solstice was time when light reached a zenith - the winter
solstice referenced the azimuth.
Archimedes first
noted aspects of the pigmentation change in plant tissue due to exposure
to sunlight and made the first reference to both photosynthesis and
the idea of marks (images) formed through light – photography.
Since then both photosynthesis and light have been the centre of much
speculative and scientific investigation.
The exquisite form,
structure, pattern and texture of plants as subject matter have fascinated
photographers since the invention of the medium. The book, Flora Photographica
by William A. Ewing, presents stunning tribute of plant images by Ansel
Adams, Eugene Atget, Hippolyte Bayard, Cecil Beaton, Julia Margaret
Cameron, William Henry Fox Talbot, Lee Friedlander, Yasuhiro Ishimoto,
André Kertész, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sheila Metzner, Joel
Meyerowitz, Duane Michals, Paul Outerbridge, George Platt Lynes, Lucas
Samaras, Edwin Smith, Edward Steichen, Josef Sudek – to name a
few.
Like the photographic
medium, photographs of plants speak of universality – they evoke
a response in people that cuts across the politics of human constructs.
From, Fox Talbot’s simple but delicate salt prints of leaves in
1838, though the global archetypes of Imogen Cunnigham’s sensual
forms of the 1940s, to the more recent and local work by Silvi Glattauer
and Julie Millowick, plants are an omnipresent subject. Glattauer’s
works are “metamorphic studies of plants investigating notions
of beauty in those transient epochs between life and death”. Millowick’s
photograms, evocative and ghostlike, explore the vestiges of abandoned
colonial gardens. As subject, plants remain ever elusive and intriguing.
In fact, plants are in themselves photographs. The largest photosensitive
emulsion that we know of is actually the planet itself. The fabric of
intricate foliage which covers areas of the globe is an ever developing
image on the surface of the planet - a giant photographic abstraction.
With my eye peering from the window of an aircraft high above the ground,
through the hazy atmosphere, the patterns of foliage across the land
evoke a sense of a planet dreaming – the mosaic is in effect giant
diffuse photogram grown from the seeds of evolution. Sometimes - it
reminds me of how Tristan Tzara described Man Ray's photograms - “
Projections .. of objects that dream and talk in their sleep”.
Perhaps our forests
images of our planet dreaming?
However during
the past century this organic emulsion has suffered a huge human intervention,
like a thick sticky dust layer, and deep gouged scratches on the most
perfect negative, the biotic emulsion of the planet has been damaged.
Has the dream turned
to nightmare?
I began gardening about the same time I started taking photographs –
these two activities have always occupied a large part of my life and
psyche – I approach both with passion. Ever in convergence - over
a period of 28 years the activities developed from distant star-like
points. Unlike the converging perspective lines in a photograph there
was no vanishing point where they faded into an unseen dimension. In
1996 there was a collision – a realization that to two activities
were actually one in the same. They both utilize light to create marks.
I began using the
photosensitive nature of plants to create images on the leaves of Bromeliad
plants. Achema, Neoregelia, Virisea, Tillandsia - bromeliads are a family
of South American plants - many are epiphytes, and for me they represent
sustainability. Many use the branches of trees for support but take
no nourishment from them, they have developed a special cell that allows
them to absorb water into the leaf structure – some form vases
that hold a reservoir of water and provide environments for other creatures.
Before quantum chemistry there was the mystique of alchemy. Through
the periodic table, and methodical practice the new science proposed
to define materials, causes and effects. But technology is a global
religion that drives an arrogant science. Inadvertently we release chemicals
into the environment and do not fully understand their effect. Like
alchemy, there is still a sense of vagueness in what we do.
Since 1989, my work had involved camera less photography - photograms.
With objects laid directly onto the emulsion, the process is seductive,
the results always a disclosure of an inherent energy the objects possesses
that can never be seen with the naked eye. My work progressed from small
silver gelatin prints, through huge colour works to free form alternative
processes works where the emulsion was painted on as motifs.
In a somewhat similar
manner to the photogram I worked directly onto the plants photosensitive
emulsion – I masked off areas of the plant tissue with opaque
tape in the form of a series of alchemic symbols. By incorporating the
vibrancy of the plants inflorescent cycle at flowering time and exposing
the plant to sunlight for up to 4 months, vibrant photosynthetic images
with vivid greens and reds were created in the very tissue of the plants.
However once the tape was removed the action that formed the image caused
the cells react again. The image faded into obscurity and the only reference
was the photographs I took of these ephemeral photosynthetic inscriptions.
The work transmutes
from photographs of plants to plants as photograph.
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