The concluding images of the comb and cone are both 42 cm x 68. I hung so a third of the image sits above my eye level and two thirds below. I left 68 cm between them to breathe.
I took these measurements and based the rest of the hanging on this. each image on the first wall hangs 42 cm apart (except for the two foundational pinhole photographs.)
I hung the so, they would read more as a pair, however this oddly hung pair looked lopsided, overweighting the composition of the wall, so instead, I matched the distance to the rest.
From left to right;
A tree splits in two, divided by a steel rod, the tree grows around it slowly accepting human intervention. The bark catches sunlight, in monochrome the wrinkles could be skin, cracked and dry.
Beside, a dandelion grows through concrete next to an exhaust grate. The grate references an unhung photogram (in brown folder.) The image was overexposed, however when attempted again with the correct exposure, the image lost its delicate textures. As a result I used the original image. Then to hang, like the previous tree is impaled with metal, i pinned it with a nail to tie them together, underlining the taking and hanging of the picture, that there was an intention -that the image is not a window but something taken from nature.
Then between the pinhole photographs and the phone-screen burns, is a contact exposure of a tree growing around metal fencing. Generated by AI this photograph leads to the next image (also AI generated) while circling back to the first image of the same subject matter. The picture was taken by exposing emulsion paper to the inverted image on a laptop screen, a bokeh created around the edge from the slightly lifted paper. This photographic convention legitimises the image.
Legitimising the image leads onto the following series of screenshot based light ‘burns.’ These four were created by pressing a phone screen onto the emulsion paper. To achieve a correct exposure I dimmed the photo in photoshop as well as lowering the phones brightness. The image when seen on a phone -with a myriad of photos as context -the image is democratised, a blurry snap of dinner holds as much value as Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras.
The American writer, Susan Sontag wrote, “The subsequent industrialisation of camera technology inly carried out a promise inherent in photography from the very beginning: to democratise all experiences by translating them into images.”[1]
[1] Sontag, Susan. On Photography, In Plato’s Cave. Penguin Books, London, England. 1977, 7.
the first prints of these came out blotchy with saturated, dominant blacks and pools of unregistered white. So I rescanned the images at 1200dpi and set limits for the levels, at 5 and 250. This means that the lightest points never reach pure white and vice versa with the blacks. These two came out softer, but with more detail in the bark and concrete -which here [where detail counts] is more important than a blown out, high-contrast ‘striking’ image.
I asked the program DALL·E 2 for: a close up photograph of a trees gnarled bark growing around iron fence. Initially I left the white borders resulting soft edges, as they provided a softening to what was a hard digital image. Though because the series of four analogue screenshots are framed, it didn’t need it. The bars in the foreground frame the image.
In the creation capture and processing of these images I learnt how to upscale resample accurately to avoid loss of detail/data. Although I didn’t try cyanotype, I had worked extensively with in the past, I was satisfied in working outside of my comfort zone, simplifying my photos, into something singular was difficult – as I usually work with more maximalist subject matter. What i noticed was an increased interest in scale. Ive always been drawn to small scale drawing/painting. I pushed away from the smaller 1:1 scale photographs and printed them on high GSM matte photo paper, this was another learning experience, I learned preparing the level values for print was super important.