For Expo:3 I was given a track by Equals (feat David Shurr) called ‘Nothing but God’ to use as inspiration. This is a beautiful piece of music and listening to the lyrics gave me a feeling of solitude. I thought about what the idea of ‘God’ is to me, and I concentrated on aspects of complexity found within every day objects and played around with the idea of light and dark. I made photograms of glass bowls to create fractal patterns, which I then contact printed to make a ‘positive’ image. This paper negative was then developed, washed and re-printed, by burning in images of nature enlarged from a 35mm Ilford FP4 film I shot, before being developed again and fixed. I chose three final prints for the exhibition, these are scanned versions of the original work. You can listen to the track just below…
The Photogram Process
To try and show the darkroom process involved in making these prints, I have included one of the test photograms which shows the effects of different amounts of light exposure on the paper.
Once the correct amount of light exposure has been determined, then photograms can be made by placing objects in between the light source and the paper…
Below are some examples of test strips used to again determine the amount of light exposure and also how effective the composition is before making a final print….
By Helen Peart
