On our second morning in London we went along to the V&A to see the exhibition Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography which features five artists who challenge the assumption that a camera is necessary to make a photograph. The work displayed is by Pierre Cordier, Susan Derges, Adam Fuss, Garry Fabian Miller and Floris Neusüss (above). Each in their different way creates haunting images by casting shadows on light-sensitive paper or by chemically manipulating its surface. In this way they capture the presence of objects, figures or glowing light, and seem to reveal processes hidden from normal view. The results are powerful images, sometimes with surreal effects and often exquisitely beautiful.
These artists create images directly on photographic paper, which uses silver salts that darken in exposure to light. By casting shadows and filtering or blocking light, or by chemically treating its surface, the paper is transformed into an image. The V&A has a page which describes these processes in detail here.
Adam Fuss grew up moving between rural Sussex in the South of England and Australia before settling to work in New York in 1982. He made his first photogram in 1986. His work concerns the discovery of the unseen: it deals with time and energy rather than material form. As well as mastering numerous historic and modern photographic techniques, Fuss has developed an array of symbolic or emblematic motifs.
Exhibition note: The butterfly is a classic symbol of the brevity of life, its flight standing for the passage of the soul. It is captured here in an obsolescent technique, that of daguerreotype. Made on silvered copper plates, daguerreotypes were invented in the 1840s and used mainly for portraiture. Here the plate has been intentionally overexposed, producing a shimmering blue.
Exhibition note: Flocks of birds scatter in flight. One bird is singled out, surrounded by a halo of others, as if protected and guided in its ascent.
Garry Fabian Miller produces works, many of which explore the cycle of time over a day, month or year, through controlled experiments with varying durations of light exposure. His works are enriched by being seen in sequences that explore and develop a single motif and colour range. Often, the images are conceived as remembered landscapes and natural light phenomena.
Exhibition note: In photography as in photosynthesis, light plays a fundamental role in creation. This work was made using beech leaves gathered from late April to early June in the artist’s garden on Dartmoor. Each vertical line was printed on one day, with the time period increasing incrementally from one day between the first lines to around two weeks in the later stages.
‘The pictures I make’, says Fabian Miller, ‘are of something as yet unseen, which may only exist on the paper surface, or subsequently may be found in the world. I am seeking a state of mind which lifts the spirit, gives strength and a moment of clarity.’
Floris Neusüss has dedicated his whole career to extending the practice, study and teaching of the photogram. Alongside his work as an artist, he is known as an influential writer and teacher on camera-less photography. Neusüss brought renewed ambition to the photogram process, in both scale and visual treatment, with the Körperfotogramms (or whole-body photograms) that he first exhibited in the 1960s. Since that time, he has consistently explored the photogram’s numerous technical, conceptual and visual possibilities.
Exhibition note: This window at Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, was the subject of the very first photographic negative, made by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1835. After covering the interior of the window with photographic paper at night, Neusüss then exposed the paper by shining a light from outside. The resulting photogram recreates the subject of Talbot’s original small negative, but life size. Here’s the original:
Neusüss’ works often deal in opposites: black and white, shadow and light, movement and stillness, presence and absence, and in the translation of three dimensions into two. These qualities are seen especially in the Körperfotogramm series (top of this post and below).
Exhibition note: The bodies in Neusüss’s ‘whole-body photograms’ appear to leap or float, as though caught in space, implying dreams of flight or nightmares of falling. Here, an adult figure adopts a foetal position silhouetted against vague indications of an interior. Neusüss’s shadowy figures often suggest an underlying symbolic narrative of sensuality, fertility, dreams or the subconscious. By removing objects from their physical context, Neusüss encourages the viewer to contemplate the essence of form. He creates a feeling of surreal detachment, a sense of disengagement from time and the physical world. Collectively, his images explore themes of mythology, history, nature and the subconscious.
In Arch, her series of dreamlike landscapes (above), Susan Derges first made images of cloud by direct digital scans of ink dispersing in water within a small glass tank. She printed these scans onto large transparencies, then placed them beneath a glass tank containing water, bracken, grasses and reeds. Next she made direct prints onto dye destruction paper placed beneath both tank and transparency. Finally, she photographed these prints and digitally stitched them together to make the large-scale digital C-prints (above).
Susan Derges has become well known for her photograms of water (such as ‘Eden’, below). To make these works, she used the landscape at night as her darkroom, submerging large sheets of photographic paper in rivers and using the moon and flashlight to create the exposure and reveal natural patterns that are hidden in the apparant chaos of water flow.
Water’s absolutely key to everything that happens internally to us and externally, and it is the most fantastic metaphor for how everything operates. It can stand for a stream of thoughts, cascades of neural activity in your mind, it can stand for the idea of a circulatory system in landscape or in the body interchangeably. It seems to be something that kind of connects everything and maybe the underlying desire to make images in the first place was to talk about what underlies the visible rather than to just show the visible.
– Susan Derges
In an essay, ‘The Music of Waves, The Poetry of Particles’, Martin Kemp compares Kathleen Raine’s poem, ‘Water’ to the work of Susan Derges in their revealing of ‘the deep pattern of things’:
There is a stream that flowed before the first beginning
Of bounding form’ that c ircumscribes
Protophyte and protozoon
The passive permeable sea obeys,
Reflects, rises and falls as forces of moon and wind
Draw this way or that in weight of waves;
But the mutable water holds no trace
Of crest or ripple of whirlpool; the wave breaks,
Scatters in a thousand instantaneous drops
That fall in sphere and ovoid, the film-spun bubbles
Upheld in momentary equilibrium of strainand stress
In the ever-changing network woven between stars.When, in the flux, the first bounding membrane
Forms, like the memory-trace of a preceding state,
When the linked organic chain
Holds against current and tide its microcosm,
Of man’s first disobedience, what first cause
Impresses without inherent being
Entities, selves, globules, vase-shapes, vortices,
Amoeboid, ovoid, pulsing or ciliate,
That check the flow of waters like forms of thought,
Pause, poised in the unremembering current
By what will be fathered in the primal matrix?
The delicate tissue of life retains, bears
The stigmata, the trace, the signature, endures
The tension of the formative moment, withstands
The passive downward deathward streaming
Leaps the falls, a salmon ascending, a tree growing.But still the stream that flows down to stillness
Seeks the end-all of all waters,
Welcomes all solving, dissolving, undoing,
Returns, looses itself, looses self and bounds,
Body, identity, memory, sinks to forgetfulness,
The state of unknowing, unbeing,
The flux that precedes all life, that we reassume, dying,
Ceases to trouble the flowing of things with the fleeting
Dream and hope and despair of this transient perilous selving.
In this YouTube video Susan Derges’ work is presented with a soundtrack accompaniment of Giacinto Scelsi’s Aitsi for nically-prepared piano:
This video features a German news report about the Shadow Catcher exhibition:
That's How The Light Gets In 