A roundup of a bunch of stuff and thoughts from this week’s classes.
Lumen prints
- These were really cool.
- Concrete vs. fleeting – In the world of digital, everything is permanent. As soon as you upload something to the internet, it will exist forever somewhere out there, and despite this I still have the habit of backing all of my useless photos of food etc. on my phone to at least three places. Rebecca talked about the idea of photography being a concrete thing, but practices like the lumen print being the antithesis of photography in that the images captured are fleeting. It’s refreshing to think about these pieces of art in the moment – it’s produced but it will keep changing until it’s gone. Digital photography is fixed, it freezes a moment in time forever, and nowadays is often reconstructed and remixed and redistributed. There’s something special about going through a simple practice of making these prints, appreciating it for what it is for the short period of time that it exists, and then for it to disappear without the need to capture it.
- Tangibility – the idea of the lumen print being a physical, tangible object as opposed to digital photographs that have no real physical being (which also raises the question of what is considered tangible – photos that exist as pixels on a screen?)
- Limitation – once exposed to light, there’s only a short period of time where you can try to form a pattern of materials before the paper starts to change. There’s also only select materials that will make an imprint. Also that fact that the photo paper was limited so we had to carefully construct our pieces, whereas on our phones we end up snapping multiples of the same scene to have the chance to go back and select the best frames.These limitations as opposed to the endless possibilities and choices that come with tech.
Old photos collage
- I had a really great time going through my family’s collection of old albums and reminiscing about childhood, but realised upon seeing all of the photos that I have no real concrete memory of any of these events happening. Rather, through seeing the places and dates on these photos, I’ve pieced together vague recollections of the places I recognise with my perception of the people with me/their relationship to me and formed some sort of constructed memories in my mind.
