Petrograph Gallery: October 2014

Thursday, October 9, 2014

The Dusk Series

I took these images at the MacDowell Art Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. I was there to write, which I did, working most of the day and coming up for air around 5pm, an hour and a half before dinner. It was then that I escaped from my studio to go for a walk. At that point, though, in the woods, it was already beginning to grow dark. I initially had a hard time shooting anything in focus, which drove me nuts. But then I thought, the hell with it, I'll exaggerate the lack of focus. I began moving the camera, and liked the effects. So I eventually opened the shutter, focused on a point of light or a patch of color, and jerked the camera around during the exposure. I looked like a bobble-head on speed or some kind of strange wood-pecker, standing in the dusk with my camera on the periphery of the woods. It sounds odd, but it was a meditative and creative exercise. Something like discovery.
I loved it.

I found that when I moved the camera, the lens "painted" with both light and color, in streaks, sparks, and glows. The results looked like pastels, like no images I've made with a camera before. I became obsessed, and began going out for twilight walks every night.

While these images aren't petrographs, they investigate the same ground: the liminal spaces between seen and intuited, light and dark, day and night, "focusing" on moments of transition rather than stability. Here's a sample of the images...

Note: This will be the first installment in an image-series based on walks I plan to take at dusk at different times of year, in different parts of the planet. Stay tuned.

Thanks for looking! -- Pam

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.