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Blossfeldt, Karl, Dipsacus laciniatus, 1928 7.5 x 10.25 in. Photogravure 1920-1929

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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]

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[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.

This establishes the perceived themes of duality and binary thinking, hoping to underline the short sighted nature of this.

The grate echoes the natural forms of spiked dandelion leaves, this provides a negative to the previous image where the steel is violently intruding the living wood.

The hard line silhouette of the comb again takes the ‘man-made’ form echoing natural forms

the fragment of shredded cone takes the same centred silhouette as the comb, but introduces the decayed nature through exterior means. To me this speaks of the decay of plastics which slowly bleed their makeup away.

The poor image can be reupholstered, with GAN (Generative adversarial networks) which gather information and assume, based on a network of existing images, the data needed in order to blow up the image without loosing quality.

However, as the data is already lost, like energy within thermodynamic physics, it cannot be pulled from nowhere. The data added mutates the image with injection of high resolution eye of a stranger. Your image becomes diluted, tainted, more than a copy.

This framework of an alternative economy for images is reflected in Web3’s promises. Web3 is a development of the way we use the internet, which in turn shapes the way we communicate through images. The premise of web3 is one of decentralisation, as opposed to web 2 where data is siphoned through private servers (e.g. Facebook, Google) and our browsing habits and choices logged and sold off for the access to those sites. Web2 is abrasive, as we pass through its virtual passages the walls scrape the information they can.

“The circulation of poor images creates a circuit, which fulfils the original ambitions of militant and (some) essayistic and experimental cinema—to create an alternative economy of images”[1]

Web3 promises a communal network, where by logging on, you contribute to the upkeep of a site, your computer supports a part of it. if practical application f delivered this would provide a drastically different alternative to the internet that we use currently. Which would in term reshape the way we communicate with image (eg. images incrypted to the block chain, which is a digitally distributed, decentralised, public ledger that exists across a network.

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[1] Steyerl, Hito. In Defence of the Poor Image, 5. Comrade, what is your visual bond today?E-Flux, Issue #10, November 2009 https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/

Initially I was hoping to expose for the most crisp silhouette, I achieved this with the image on the left. However the stark black on white seemed clinical, I wanted the sharp silhouette but felt the interior details were lacking. So instead of photographing it traditionally, where the interior black would be detailed, I tried other methods of illustrating textures. I tried a variety of methods; shining light through the side of the subject, bouncing light with a glass panel underneath, however the best results were from wetting the emulsion paper before placing the negative on top for a contact exposure.

Looking at the methods of making, as Karl Blossfelt looks at photography as a mirror of the reality of live. This operation denies the production or the means of making/taking of the image. With the above image, the brightness slider is visible. As an icon, symbolising the light required and the source of light. The brightness icon is framed in the centre, becoming subject of the foreground. This celebrates the making of the image as opposed to karl blossfelts, where the photograph is invisible and we only see the work.

Roland Barthes, a French philosopher, describes “the photograph… [as] always invisible, [that] it is not it that we see, but the subject or spectacle, which adds to it that rather terrible thing… [present] in every photograph: the return of the dead.”1

Barthes argues, the photograph is not what it mounts; without its subject, the photograph is reduced to the actions and reasons that led the photographer to capture it.

1 Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. London, England: Vintage Classics, 1981, 5.

2 Berger, John. 2008. Ways of seeing. Penguin Modern Classics. London, England: Penguin Classics, 24.

Karl Blossfeldt was a 20th century German photographer, who researched and analysed nature in its empirical organic forms. This in-depth study of botanical forms, which began in 1896, was carried out over a period of three decades using his preferred medium of photography which best mirrors life as we see it. By photographing every plant with the same camera and maintaining consistency throughout, his body of work takes on the quality of a scientific study . Blossfeldt sparked a flurry of interest in sculptural studies among avant-garde, literary, and cultural circles. In his article “Le language des fleurs,” published in his magazine Documents in June 1929, George Bataille referred to these images as being somewhere between the new objectivity and surrealism. In this article, the plant is seen as a symbol of the tension between obscenity and cultivation, a polarity on which he based numerous analyses. Franz Roth also likened these studies to Max Ernst’s Histoire Naturelle.

“IF I GIVE SOMEONE A HORSETAIL HE WILL HAVE NO DIFFICULTY MAKING A PHOTOGRAPHIC ENLARGEMENT OF IT. ANYONE CAN DO THAT. BUT TO OBSERVE IT, TO NOTICE AND DISCOVER OLD FORMS, IS SOMETHING ONLY FEW ARE CAPABLE OF.”

– Karl Blossfeldt

Blossfeldt specialised in macrophotography, which at the time was unprecedented, capturing and bringing out patterns and natural rhythm that had gone unnoticed – unnoticed in the scale of observation. As observing the beauty of a flower is different to seeing it printed to 1m². As a result Blossfeldt’s everyday botanical samples expressed rhythmic forms which, much like most of western civilisations claimed ‘discoveries’ were presented as new knowledge. eg. Blossfeldt did not discover the beauty of a flower much like how Aotearoa was not discovered by James Cook. However, Blossfeldt saw his work acting as a tool and as inspiration for artists, architects and sculptors. ‘It was his firm belief that only through the close study of the intrinsic beauty present in natural forms, that contemporary art would find its true direction.’¹

¹https://www.michaelhoppengallery.com/artists/58-karl-blossfeldt/overview/#/artworks/12148

The content of the instagram post is Heto Steryl’s in defence of the poor image passed through Glass.Leaves, a machine learning program that creates poetry from the input text.
The instagram post is then screenshot with the borders of a different app cropping the existing image. The iPhone with the screenshot is then pressed into the photosensitive paper creating a contact print negative. I liked how the images looked when blue tacked onto the studio walls, though was interested in the legitimising quality of photosensitive paper. Framing the paper further hightens the dissonance between how it is consumed as a png as opposed to a framed film print.

Framing?

What happens when the print is elevated from the studio wall? I made frames, one of scrap pohutukawa, one of pine. They the backing, when the images are displayed on the segment of wall replica.

TEST layouts

Working within the western convention of reading left to right, the work establishes itself with two pinhole photographs. The two larger images above are inkjet prints on standard paper. Left a tree split in half, the two halves kept apart with a steel rod, the tree grows around it. This image was one of the first well exposed images I took. Thematically and chronologically it provides a foundation for the reading of the rest of my work. This foundation establishes a conflict between nature and nurture, how much of a divide exists between the natural environment and the environments people create. People are a result of nature as is the resources that provide material for the bridges (concrete infrastructure, cars roads etc.) we build. It is obvious that as soon as there is an intervention,
an example in food; an organic rib eye steak when compared to a pale hotdog sausage, is unprocessed. However without human intervention neither would be stoked on the supermarket shelves – both are processed.

The two images above share conventions, both are photograms, centrally framed, the have a strong horizontal structure to the upper section of their subject. However the images decay from left to right, the form of the fence, reads as natural forms found in art Art Nouveau, which was infoRmed by Karl Blossfeldt’s work. while on the right the shape is abstracted, resembling an inverted flower? or a bird with spread wings? Either way, it becomes more symbolic than didactic

How does nature draw itself. Nature draws itself whether we see it or not. Nature is unwavering in its constant drawing over itself. It is never static, always in flux.

Nature sustains an unfaltering stubbornness to procreate, a weed finds a crack between road and the pavement to grow, a tree ceaselessly forces its way through the tarmac above and below its roots.

To Civilisation, this is an undesired reclamation is decay. like the mould on your shower’s ceiling or the tree leaning in on your overgrown garden’s fences,

This process of decay is essential to new life. It is the unfaltering march of time, entropy states that as time goes on the chaotic nature of all things will increase or (stay the same, never decreasing.) so to maintain a clean shower, one must actively fight against time.

Entropy is decay, we combat decay, but when looking at it like this there is no clawing back of what has happened- one cannot un-expose the photosensitive paper- so looking at this, knowing that nothing can be created. Each image we see already was.

The sun yellows white plastic by degrading it, the same degradation can be seen in the chemical reaction when exposing a photosensitive slide of paper to light. This change is irreversible.

The tools we use to combat decay

A comb, used to deny the unruly ‘nature’ of our hair. Found on the road beginning its 450 year journey  to decomposition.

A segment of a fence, used keep the outside world from the interior ducts. Found on the road rusting.

A shredded road cone, aside from its orange colour, it is rendered unrecognisable and useless from its paternal symbol of control and order on the road (where it, and the other objects were found. It resembles the organic growth of lichen.