text - PLANeT - a series of photosynthetic works - © Lloyd Godman
The
Force that Feeds Us
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. |