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• 1 2025-06-07T16:05:45+00:00 Light Drawing with the Sun 17 Lumen-osity plain 2025-06-12T21:53:03+00:00 53.61797, -113.4582 Dear Monique,
  These images are lumen prints. They are made using photographic paper with a plant collected from my garden, and placed on them in the sun for a few hours. I mention this alternative camera- less photographic method because it is central to my goals and the point of the exercise. The image that is produced is extremely unstable. If it continues to be exposed to light, it will vanish. If it is “fixed” with photo developing fixative chemicals, it will be permanent, but altered in that the image will be in black and white, drained of the odd and disturbing colours that are produced by the mixture of sun and chemicals from the plants themselves. Therefore, these images live in the dark, in a folder, tucked away in a dark drawer. Fragile, ephemeral, nearly intangible and terribly delicate. They live in an in between space of being, tucked away out of sight. It breaks all of the rules for good photographic practice. It is neither a photograph, nor is not a photograph. It is in peril of not existing at any moment.
  
  Why do this? Why not take a real picture, record the image in a lasting manner? Traditional photograph captures the “what” of the subject, and for purposed of records, it can fix the details of the subject in minute accuracy of detail. This alternative, camera-less method offers something different for me. It is the “why” and also the feeling of the subject more so that the object itself. They record not just the trace of what has existed, but also the pain of the loss, the ephemerality of life, its temporality and mortality too. Nothing lasts forever.
  
  This camera-less photographic method is an abandonment of control too. I don’t know what the image will look like in the end. I don’t know how long it will take to print, or how much detail will be preserved. The lumens will do what they are going to do and I have little control over the result. It is very much a surrender of the idea that photography can capture and preserve our reality. I surrender to the medium, the effects of the sun, the process of development.  I like the surprise of discovery, the sigh of beauty as the print is revealed. It is a moment of recognition of wonder, and it is made more beautiful because it is fleeting, difficult to preserve and accordingly, feels very intimate, like secrets being shared from the sun and the plant. As Hornby describes, “ it is a labour of light” (Hornby 90) and it feels sacred, ritualistic.
  
  You pointed me towards to the work of Anna Atkins and Virgina Woolf, “two daughters of “educated men” (Woolf’s self-declared identity in Three Guineas)” (90). Atkins, renowned for her early Cyanotypes, published in 1843 in Photographs of British Algae, and Woolf, who Hornby uses as a comparator to Atkins, a kind of verbal photographer who understood the “materials of photography, constructing a limited yet certain knowledge of the object world by means of the singular imprint of light” (90), Hornby argues extirpates, “the figure of the central viewing subject in favor of objective, subjectless observation […which…] disrupts the privileged bond between (male) subjectivity  and vision, presenting a version of modernist objectivity that does not objectify, but is the automatic transfer from object to image” (90). Further, this art form could be understood as a “feminized relationship to authorship, and yoke it to an understanding of objectivity that unseats the male ideology of positivism and decouples visual epistemology and the male gaze” (90). The image is at once familiar and uncanny; it oscillates between being a perfect replica of the plant, and a ghostly impression of what we remember the plant to be. As Hornby describes, cyanotypes (and other camera less photography that use a similar method,  bear “the physical form and trace of the object through flat and direct contact between object and paper in the creation o the original negative” (91).
  
  You said that the impulse to etch your initial into the sidewalk in front of your house was an, “This was an act of preservation tied, as so many things we do, to some kind of unarticulated anticipated grief around disappearance.”
  
  My images are exactly that- anticipated disappearance, expected disappearance. But also a sense that life is so final that the grief the expected disappearance inspires will not even allow a permanent record, but rather, a trace that will also disappear.
  It seems to be a contradiction in impulse—the impulse to record the beautiful things that we treasure in our world, but they are but a trace- a poor, impermanent record of what has been here, what lived, breathed, and reproduced. I will house those traces in a dark file in a drawer in my office, to be discovered one day by someone who will just catch a glimpse of them before they fade away forever.
  
  Works Cited:
         Atkins, Anna. Photogaphs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. Halstead Places, Seven Oaks, England. 1843-53. 
  https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-4b3b-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99  
  
  Hornby, Louise E. J. “The Cameraless Optic: Anna Atkins and Virginia Woolf.” English Language Notes, vol. 44, no. 2, Sept. 2006, pp. 87–100. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-44.2.87.