Petrograph Gallery

Monday, November 21, 2011

GRAND CANYON

After Image Series

Post 10

While I worked on printing my Canyon shadow photos on Atlantic beach pebbles, I wondered what the heck I was going to do with them. I'd thought about the space and time considerations that inspired them, but not what I would do with them aesthetically.

While I was at the Canyon I considered using them as a decorative border in a larger work. Here's a rough sketch...

But then I thought that the inclusion of larger, more representational images would dissipate their impact. I didn't want the shadow pebbles to be just decorative trim. So I scratched that idea.

Then I thought about using them as 3-dimensional brushstrokes that together would create a larger image, as these post-it sketches show. The first one depicts the split-twig figurine I mentioned in Post 7; the second, a Native American pot I bought--I included a photo of the actual pot because I think it's beautiful. (I made these sketches while on the phone with a tech rep in New Delhi, who was trying to help me install a new printer that came without a software CD. He and I spent so much time on the phone together that when we finally hung up all his co-workers got on the line to say good-bye as well, and I knew his grandmother's recipe for dal.)

I had a happy week during which I thought these post-its cracked the issue, but then I decided they were hokey. Also, I'd have to make a ton of printed pebbles...

And then I began thinking about boomerangs and clocks.

I remembered the false After Image I'd had plastered on my retina back at the Canyon--whether from altitude sickness, exhaustion, or eye strain--and realized I could conjure its boomerang shape and suggestive, Native American-like geometric designs with the printed pebbles. These images could be emblematic of my whole Canyon experience.

Here's a sketch I made of what an After Image design might look like a dusk, taken against a backdrop of marsh grass (I was anticipating an upcoming vacation in Maine, where I intended to photo the petrograph pebbles along the coast), and a photo from the actual installation.

I'd written down the time of day I'd taken every shadow picture. So I began to think I could also arrange the pebbles in a row to create clocks: essentially sundials in straight lines. I imagined one as a Canyon Clock of particular shadows I'd come to know well and considered emblematic of different times of day: morning, noon, and night. In these images time, symbolized by shadows, would tick forward but location--the Grand Canyon--would remain the constant. (Sorry, no sketches for that...)

Another might be a World Clock, of shadows taken at the Canyon at different times of day, which I could use to stand in for different locations around the world: in this sundial time would remain still but locations would imaginatively roam the globe. To create this series I found shadows I'd shot at 9:30 am, 1:30 pm, 3:30 pm, and 4:30 pm, representing, sequentially, the same moment at the Grand Canyon; La Paz, Bolivia; Tasiilaq, Greenland, and Cardiff, Wales. I thought I might write a one-page story to correspond to each pebble in the clock...

Here's how it turned out...

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Artist's Statement

Petrographs are silver gelatin images printed on stone. My name—Petro—means rock in Greek. What a stroke of luck….

When natives of northeastern Siberia saw a view camera for the first time they called it, “a three-legged device that draws a man’s shadow to stone.”

Petrographs do the same thing. By casting and briefly fixing our shadows to the bedrock, they juxtapose the “snapshot” span of our mortal memories with the vastness of geological time. And that puts humans’ experience on earth back into perspective. We are not the planet’s masters. We’re just one of many species passing through deep time.

I grew up with rocks in the house—my father was a mineral collector—but I don’t make petrographs for keeps. After harvesting rocks from rivers, seabeds, and quarries, I coat them in photographic emulsion, print them with images from the human sphere, and return them to their original locations. Then time, water, sunlight, and weather do their erosive work as I record the process with my camera. The results, revealing the rocks as they’re distorted, obscured, and weathered by ever-shifting environmental factors, evoke in days the passage of years, and tether us to natural cycles of decomposition and replenishment. The installations, which scientists assure me have no ill-effects on their host eco-systems, are fleeting. Our images disappear, and the rocks return to their own silent business.

There is a Welsh word—hiraeth—that has no cognate in English. It suggests something akin to the “presence of absence,” and refers to a deep, and creative, longing for something unattainable that exists only in the imagination, possibly beyond place or time. In the case of Wales, a subject state since the 13th century, it derives from a longing for a national history that should have been but never was: a gap filled by myths, legends, and once-and-future yearnings.

Petrographs exist in the gap between human consciousness and the world around us. As our images erode in the sea or a river or under the snow, or the sun weathers and cracks them, their weathering enacts the presence of absence before our eyes: the hiraeth of the natural cycle. They insist that our lives are snapshot moments, and that we belong to the earth—that it is our home.

Petrographs’ insistence on our place in the natural order is a sometimes beautiful, occasionally unnerving reminder of how place shapes us—the rocks’ histories, formed and distorted by glaciers, ancient seas, fire, and ice, become miniature landscapes that give mass and form to our memories—and how everything we do imprints, for better or worse, on the environment.