"Making A Photograph (Pt. 1) is an inquiry into the invention, hypotheses, and half-blind-perseverance that steered the thinking and discoveries of the 19th century photo-chemists.
By utilizing both my own cameras and chemistry, I’ve created images which I can claim to be entirely of my own making, not simply in composition but in every element of the photographic process. In doing this, I’ve gained profound insight into the energy and determination required of inventors like Herschel, Daguerre, and Niépce– chemists whose legacy and research changed the visual and technological reality of our world.
The work created over the course of this project ranges from equations and visual diagrams to prototyped cameras and large-scale prints. The two largest pieces were both made with exposure times greater than one hour and utilize a barely-recorded variation of the cyanotype process to allow for in-camera exposure possibilities. These images are representative of the experimentation and discovery that went into the project as a whole, giving the viewer a glimpse into the invisible world captured by the necessarily long nature of these daytime exposures.
In conversation with the history of photographic image making, Making a Photograph (Pt.1) works to broaden collective understanding at the intersection of science and art as well as what it means to ‘make’, ‘take’, and ‘capture’ a photograph.
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