Petrograph Gallery

Monday, January 9, 2012

GRAND CANYON:

AfterImage Series

Post 16

Welcome to the BLACK AND WHITE post.

Up until I went to the Canyon I'd only shot petrographs in black and white, and did all the printing myself in the darkroom. (Not the developing; I hate developing. I have to thank Iris Photo, in downtown Northampton, for that.) But the Canyon residency inspired me to acquire an on-sale Olympus DSLR camera, which I've grown to love like a limb. There was so much nuanced color in the ashes, grasses, sand, mud, and sea shots that I fell in love with color, and took most of the AfterImage Series in it.

That said...I also shot black and white film with my ancient Minolta SLR, and this is the post of those images. I've yet to print any large-scale in the darkroom, but hope to sometime this spring--after I quit writing this blog! (They'll be posted eventually...)

So here's a gallery of black and white work of the AfterImage pebbles, printed with Grand Canyon shadows.

AfterImage undone by the tide

Canyon Clock--telling time sequentially through shadows--on Jasper Beach, Maine

I'm thinking of calling this "Ancestry." Does that resonate with anyone?

The World Clock: Time, Inundated

Stages of the World Clock

The AfterImage in ashes

AfterImages in Black and White Light: Dawn, Noon, Dusk

Whatever comes of this in the final, printed version, it probably won't look like this. I'm just messing around with my favorite, arrow-shaped shadow, playing with shapes, textures, ideas. If anyone has any thoughts, good or bad, don't hesitate to let me know!

Addendum, 13 Jan. 2012: I neglected to say when I originally put up this post that my idea for creating pebble collages came from my friend Annette Kling, from Mannheim, Germany. When Annette was visiting us in November she played around with the black and white pebble photos and created some cool designs...an idea that hadn't really occurred to me. So I promised I'd credit her on the blog, and then forgot!! So now I am...Thanks, Annette!

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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.