Saw this exhibition with Rebecca Saks, one of my best friends, who has been living in Finland for the last year. She has a lovely blog called: Saks in Finland, which any lover of the north pole and surrounding areas should check out. It was lovely to see this exhibition with her, on our own day together in six months, maybe I was feeling sentimental, but the exhibition was very beautiful and it has stuck with me subsequently. Derges makes the most beautiful waterscapes I have ever seen. True Art.
Camera-Less photography at the V and A
‘Shadow Catchers: Camera-Less Photography’ is the title visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London are presented with. Two impossibilities? Catching shadows and taking photographs without a camera are two things I considered unlikely if not unfeasible, before seeing this exhibition. This view however has changed, as I have seen photographs made with no lenses and shadows trapped on paper for eternity. The definition of a photograph is ‘a picture made using a camera, in which an image is focused on to light-sensitive material and then made visible and permanent by chemical treatment’, but the works on display made by five contemporary artists defy this definition. Floris Neususs, Pierre Cordier, Susan Derges, Garry Fabian Miller and Adam Fuss each work with photographic equipment, chemicals and light processes without bringing a camera into the equation. The V and A makes the claim that the art on display is therefore ‘an original’ whereas a photograph is a copy made from a negative, a reproduction of a reality. The pieces that adorn the walls of the exhibition have a more enticing mystical quality than standard photographic exhibitions, although they do not break so far into fantasy that they become paintings. They occupy a liminal space between the two job titles of ‘photographer’ and ‘painter’.
Each artist in the exhibition uses different techniques to abandon camera, to great differentiation and effect. My personal favourite was the work of the eccentric Pierre Cordier; an artist experimenting with the chemicals in photographic development to create pieces of art that are nothing like reality. Cordier describes how he experiments with hundreds of pieces, processed randomly to create. Developer and Fixers are used to create light and dark whilst anything from nail varnish to eggs is added to the concoction to create new patterns. The work at the end of this slightly insane process is amazing. Labyrinths of intricate parallel patterns, swirls of never-ending neatness, the randomness is lost in the end product which appears totally contained and calculated. The work created by Cordier are called ‘chemigrams’ and he is the pioneer of this increasingly popular technique.
Another artist who caught my eye in the exhibition was the British Artist Susan Derges. Her interest is water: its movement and its strong symbolism. She worked in Devon during the 1990’s and used the night sky as her darkroom and the currents in rivers as her subject. The work she has created is sublime; it is captured by reflecting water on photographic paper held under the flow of water, with sheets of foil to reflect the light. It appears a bit like the bark on a withered tree, but with the feeling of movement and dynamism, which can be lost in photographs. Derges’ work is big bold and beautiful. It is nature as close to the real thing as you can get in artistic reproduction.
On the whole the exhibition is seamlessly curated and easily explored, a series of video installations at the heart of the exhibition provide a truly moving artists’ eye view of the world of camera-less photography and the pictures are indescribably absorbing, clever and natural. The exhibition runs at the Victoria and Albert Museum until the 20th of February, so if you get a chance, get up to London and see this contemporary exhibition – it is the best thing I have seen in the V&A for a long time.
