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Struck by Light: EXP-21 Barcelona 2021
‘Struck by Light’ an exhibition exhibited at The Experimental Photography Festival 2021 in Barcelona
Sustainably sourced Walnut frames designed collaboratively by Studio Illingworth and the artist.
Review for PhotoMonitor written by Ish Doney.
From daguerreotype to cyanotype to polaroid to digital, light is the one thing that every photograph relies on for its creation. Photography’s talent for reproduction is such that we tend to ignore the object in favour of its subject, look past the material form, into the image. The artists in Struck by Light, an exhibition curated by Cristina Fontsaré and Megan Ringrose, produce photographs that counter this type of interaction. Working with a gamut of alternate processes, these artists take light and the materials and processes of photography as their subject, creating vibrant, often abstract, forms that invite the viewer to question what they are seeing.
Experimentation and play are crucial to how these artists work. For some, like Poppy Lekner, Liz Harrington, and Nettie Edwards, this takes place outdoors, using touch to ground the relationship between subject and image. Rather than standing before the camera, the subject – be it a loved one’s belongings or a vulnerable environment – makes physical contact with the light-sensitive material. Anna Luk and Emilie Poiret-Brown take these experiments into the darkroom, where they explore photography by pursuing qualities typically tethered to painting and sculpture. Megan Ringrose uses historical iron-based processes to link her camera-less images to the past using ultraviolet light as the subject in her series entitled ‘Light collage’. Ky Lewis relies upon time and chance. Her images depict trees, buildings and the path of the sun. These solargraphs were created using pinhole cameras loaded with water, seeds, and photographic paper and placed outside for sixty days, so that the plants grew towards the same sun these images record.
Struck by Light evolved from a Hundred Heroines online exhibition, sparked by Ellen Carey’s central question, ‘What is a twenty-first century photograph?’. Photography spent much of its adolescence concerned with truth and reality, the ethics of looking, and the fight to be accepted as an art form. The beginning of the twenty-first century brought these debates into the digital, querying whether sensors and pixels were a progression from analogue photography or a radical break with it. It’s interesting then that the photographers answering this call use largely analogue techniques in an often abstract approach, moving away from questions of representation towards what could be considered a new photographic modernism.
Carey founded her own practice on interrogating the medium. For this show, she combines ‘the selfie’ with 20 X 24 polaroids, using physical force to disrupt the image-making process. Erika G Santos also harnesses destruction in her series entitled ‘Dismantled’, beginning with 35mm negatives exposed in-camera and using tools and chemicals to disrupt the image, moving it from figurative to abstract. Kateryna Snizhko’s manipulated risographs are purely abstract, with an environmental consciousness, calling to mind petri dishes seen through a microscope. Cristina Fontsaré and Sonia Mangiapane each introduce unexpected colours and textures to imagine strange and wonderful journeys. Analogue approaches are combined with digital in the works of Jessy Boon Cowler and Lauren Spencer. For Cowler, this is done by collaging prints, while Spencer uses light from her smartphone to expose photographic paper in the darkroom.
The works brought together in Struck by Light resist easy viewing, calling instead for a sustained gaze that emphasises materiality and process over subject. These photographs revel in their physical forms; there is much to be gained from seeing them in person. The move from an online exhibition space to a physical one allows for exactly this type of interaction and is an opportunity that should not be missed.