Liminal spaces

A few test shots I did today for a 'liminal spaces' I'll be working on over the next year.

Industrial and commercial parks intrigue me because most of them seem to hover between industry and the encroachments of the scraggier, more tenacious ends of nature. Amidst the access roads, warehouses, prefab units and lorry parks there are empty or derelict lots and strips of nowhere land where weeds and small wildlife thrive. They're a precursor of what will happen when one day humanity loses its grip and nature rolls over our abandoned structures and deserts of tarmac and concrete. It's Life After People, and at the edges of our world it's already happening.

Shadow writing

This technique for creating photographic images without a camera was pioneered by Wedgwood and Davy as early as the 1790s. It's believed that Wedgwood and Davy failed to find any means of fixing the images they made, which meant that the continued reaction of the chemicals to light eventually erased the images entirely. However, there's some evidence that images they produced did in fact survive until the late 19th Century - which would mean that they achieved a fix after all.

But it's W.H. Fox Talbot who is most associated with this method of producing photographic images. He called his process "sciagraphy" or "shadow writing" and used saline solutions both to photosensitize paper and to fix the images he produced.

Imagine a world before photography. The only pictures most people would ever see were paintings - largely the preserve of institutions and of the wealthy - and print illustrations. Those with the resources could commission portrait painters but most people had no images of their loved ones, no snapshots of their childhood, no visual record whatsoever of their experiences.

That chemistry and sunlight could capture images of real objects must have seemed a lot like magic, even to a scientist like Talbot.

It still seems like magic today.

Primitives and digital primitives

1. Fern - contact print

2. Starlings, from digital negative

3. Beach, from digital negative

Method for fern: fern frond on b&w photographic paper under glass, exposed to sunlight for 1 hour. Fix and rinse. Gold texture in Photoshop.

Method for 2 & 3:

Digital negative - open positive in PS > image > adjustments > invert

Print > transparency film for Epson Photo R300

Negative on b&w photographic paper under glass, exposed 90 minutes. Fix and rinse. Tweaked Curves in PS

Birdman

Lumen print - photography without a camera