Petrograph Gallery

Monday, December 19, 2011

GRAND CANYON:

AfterImage Series

Post 14

At the end of July Marguerite and I rented a 200 year-old house in Harrington, Maine. Here's the house:

And here's the view:

And here's our dog, Tenby--then 14 and a half--enjoying herself in the seagrass (her 15th birthday is on January 11th)

This is where I got the idea of including grass as one of the backdrops for the pebble designs. It would legitimately represent a phase of the Canyon's development--when the area was covered in shallow seas, fringed with sea grasses, which later became an organic contribution to the limestone--as well as add color and texture to the photos. I thank the dog for the suggestion.

It wasn't so bad photographing the pebbles in sea grass during the day. Biting horseflies the size of small planes buzzed around, but I could more or less swat them away. The dusk shots, however, were a bloody a nightmare. Mosquitos swarmed, literally turning the sleeve of my neon-red rain jacket black, they were so dense, so that I had to cover myself head to toe. Still they swarmed around my face and I thought I'd go mad from the buzzing. That's why there aren't more twilight shots...Here are some:

World Clock, Twilight, Marsh Grass

After Image Twilight, Marsh Grass

And by day:

Canyon Clock, Marsh Grass

AfterImage, Marsh Grass

Finally, here are some of the petrograph pebbles, taken in the marsh grass, which incorporate semi-abstract shots of the landscape in which they were photographed:

We found the work of a couple of artists we really liked while we were in Harrington. Here are 2 of them:

Obadiah Bourne Buell: http://bournedesigns.info/granitegarden.html, and Philip Frey: www.philipfrey.com

Have a look...

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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.