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Crush & Ding combines Polaroid and photogram using the Polaroid negative to create new abstract forms and blended hues with experimental approaches and innovative process-driven methods located in: chemistry-laden Polaroid pods and the light-tight color darkroom. Here, Polaroid’s 20th century instant technology meets the wonder of 19th century photograms.
Crush & Ding links my photographic experiments in color with process, minimalism and abstraction, light and its variations, often with zero exposure, uniting my twin practices Struck by Light and Photography Degree Zero for the first time. Crush & Pull bridges ideas from my own photograms, its history and practitioners to ideas in Polaroid, instant technology's history and those practitioners. My project revisits the negative, rich in -- metaphor, object, picture ‘sign’ -- that delivers a whole new approach to picture making, underscored in -- concept, context, content -- with a unique, new photographic object that has never been seen or done before.
The history of the ‘shadow’ in art is cited in photogram, a paper negative (1834) contact printed for its positive (1840). Polaroid 20 X 24 (circa 1980s) makes a large negative transferring it in development to make the positive (www.20X24Studio.com) in a one-step, peel-away process, a large contact print in 60 seconds. The negative-to-positive duality, the foundation in all photography, is similar in photogram and Polaroid processes; I am the only Polaroid artist to keep and exhibit the negatives. In current discourse, the negative is often forgotten, remaining “hidden”, a means to an end, a document, its ‘picture sign’ in portrait, landscape, still life, figure.
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Victoria and Albert Museum's photography collection
National Science and Media Museum
RPS Journal 1853-2012 online and searchable
Photographic History Research Centre, Leicester
Birkbeck History and Theory of Photography Research Centre
William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné
British Photography. The Hyman Collection
The Press Photo History Project Mapping the photo agencies and photographers of Fleet Street and the UK
The correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot
Historic England Archive
UAL Photography and Photography and the Archive Research Centre
Royal Photographic Society's Historical Group
www.londonstereo.com London Stereoscopic Company / T. R. Williams
www.earlyphotography.co.uk British camera makers and companies
Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock.
National Portrait Gallery, London
http://www.freewebs.com/jb3d/
Alfred Seaman and the Photographic Convention
Frederick Scott Archer
© 2021 Created by Michael Pritchard.
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