Petrograph Gallery

Saturday, December 3, 2011

GRAND CANYON

AfterImage Series

Post 12

After the milkweed episode (see Post 11), I realized I needed to consider a couple of things. I liked the look of the milkweed images, but they were random and rushed (I worked so fast I knocked myself in the teeth with my camera; I can't even begin to reconstruct how I did that). So...

1. I needed to think out how and where I'd shoot the pebbles--against what kinds of backgrounds? How would they look in terms of texture and color, and what meaning would they bring to the series?

2. I needed to decide how to arrange the pebbles. I'd come up with the World and Canyon Clock formats, and the AfterImage shape, but what else? Decorative patterns based on Native American geometries? I had to think about that...

3. I definitely needed to number the pebbles on the back and sketch out templates for each design. The clock patterns required particular pebbles, shot at specific times of day, but I had a box of 27 pebble petrographs that all looked pretty similar; I needed to make a shadow time chart, assign each shadow photo a number, and then mark the printed pebbles with corresponding numbers. Below are some of my notebook pages about the numbering system. The wrinkles and dirt on the second two page images come from them having been stuffed in every pocket I own, dropped in the sea, stepped on, you name it.

I also needed to create a system so I could arrange the stones quickly when I was on location with them, shifting from one pattern to another. After a few tries WITHOUT working from charts and numbers, I could see I was in real danger of losing my mind, squatting in dirt, bending over a line of pebbles with a crick in my back and two cameras swinging around my neck, trying to figure out which shadow pebble went where, while simultaneously attempting to switch between my new DSLR and old film camera (for the black and white images), without strangling myself. Not to mention fighting off both mosquitos and curious onlookers....

I thought it would be interesting, both visually and metaphorically, to work with background elements that represented different phases of the Grand Canyon's development: ash, for the volcanic rock; water, for ancient seas and the Colorado River, both of which have mightily shaped the Canyon; and both sand and mud, for the layers of sedimentary rock that make up the Canyon's walls. Later I decided to add colored beach pebbles themselves as a backdrop, as precursors to sand (mainly for visual interest) and also sea grass, representing the metamorphosed vegetable matter in Canyon rock.

Here's an early sketch I made of what I thought the World Clock series might look like, shot against different backgrounds: ashes, sand, marsh grass, and sea water.

A little crude, but you get the point.

There were also ideas that I discarded--or let's say shelved. I thought for awhile about placing the shadow pebbles on a musical scale as if they were notes--maybe a scale I'd drawn in the sand. And then let the tide come in and rearrange them...(I dreamt about copying the sheet music from "Thunder Road" in sand on the beach, with the pebbles as notes, and then photographing what happened to the music after waves moved the pebbles. How would the sea rewrite Bruce Springsteen, and how would that sound? I was first excited about this, then thought it was just plain nuts, then thought it really wasn't such a bad idea, and finally realized it was too hard for now...) Here's a sketch from my notebook depicting the shadow music...

Here's how the World Clock sketch turned out, photographed. The image on the left shows the pebbles in water; on the right, in twilight on seagrass, which actually looks more like the sketch...

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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.