Petrograph Gallery

Sunday, December 11, 2011

GRAND CANYON:

AfterImage Series

Post 13

In this post I'm going to write about ashes. Fireplace ashes, to be specific, which means the ashes of oak trees from my childhood home in New Jersey, chopped by my father and brought to Massachusetts for Marguerite and me to burn.

These images are quick mock-ups of potential, finished work that I made using the "light table" feature of Mac's Aperture program (that's why they have those little white boxes in the lower righthand corners). Each one is composed of individual shots of petrograph designs, created using the Grand Canyon shadow pebbles.

I shot these outside in my backyard in July. I filled a large Pyrex baking dish with fireplace ashes and then arranged the pebbles in the ashes according to different designs. The different colors are achieved entirely from shooting the pebbles at different times of day: dawn (God help me), noon, late afternoon, and dusk, just before dark. The line of AfterImages was shot at dawn, around 8am, noon, 5pm, 8pm, and 8:45pm.

The image below is the World Clock Series--each pebble's shadow representing the same moment at the Grand Canyon, La Paz, Bolivia, Tasiilaq, Greenland, and Cardiff, Wales--shot, clockwise, at dawn, noon, 5:30pm, and 8:30pm.

I created designs based on the World Clock Series, the Canyon Sundial Series, the AfterImage shape, and several abstract patterns. It was fun but as always, there was a learning curve. I took me awhile to realize I was shooting some of the pebbles upside down, so I had to make a big post-it note about that and stick it on the pyrex dish. And then any indentations in the ashes--fingerprints, pebbleprints, whatever--showed up on film, especially when the sun was low and casting shadows, so I had to make sure the layer of ashes was perfectly smooth. Here's an example of what it looked like when the ashes weren't smooth:

Very moon-like, and kind of cool, except that the ash-shadows distracted from the pebbles.

I got very dirty doing this, and the dog's black coat was streaked in ashes. The mosquitos, especially while I was taking the dusk shots, were fierce.

I also took black and white shots on my film camera, but I'm saving those for another entry...

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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.