Crush & Pull

The future has arrived with Crush & Pull. How is this photograph made and what is this a picture of are questions often asked about my work. The first question addresses the process of photography, while finding an image without a picture sign frames the second one. The end results in my work purposely collapse the historical and cultural expectations for a photograph to record, document, and preserve moments. Instead, my pictures offer up the ‘zero’ from my Polaroid practice Photography Degree Zero. Light challenges analog and digital image-makers while inventors continuously devise instruments for them to document their surroundings. Photographers use light in all different ways — shadow, outline, reflection, silhouette — however, I often cannot see light while I work, leading me to wonder what the light does on its own, what are light’s first traces? and how does its non-materiality form the object? My projects start with questions and here I ask, what is a 21st century photograph? Crush & Pull finds my answer in partnering the 19th century photogram (1834) with 20th century Polaroid 20 X 24 instant technology (circa 1980s). As I wonder what these two have in common and where they overlap the negative sees my answer. In current discourse, the negative, merely a means to an end, is often forgotten, remains hidden. Photographic art history sites the shadow’s origin at the dawn of this medium in photogram, a paper negative contact printed for its positive (1840). Polaroid 20 X 24 makes a monumental negative that once exposed to light and developed transfers to make its positive (www.20X24Studio.com) in a one-step, peel-away process. I am a Polaroid artist — the only one who keeps the negative. The negative-to-positive duality, the foundation in all photography, finds visual affinities linked thorough process, in photogram and Polaroid. How is the final object made? Crush & Pull begins with a Polaroid negative, reversing time-honored photogram methods wherein the image ends as a negative. Touching the surface emulsion is a long-held taboo that is broken when I physically crush-ding the Polaroid negative into object and receiver of light. This echoes my darkroom practice, wherein the light-sensitive photographic paper is literally Struck by Light, replacing the referent with photography’s indexical sign – light. Crush & Pull is unique and new. My performance in the light-tight, black box of the colour darkroom lets light create on its own terms. This work proposes advances in invention and light, thereby allowing a new photo-object to ‘speak’. It introduces new abstract forms such as craquelure and new colours arising from blended hues, that are highlighted by experimental approaches and process-driven methods and an ode to photography’s history and practitioners. Crush & Pull revisits the negative in Polaroid’s dark ground of solid ‘shadow’ with matte surface patinas and irregular topographies find the artist’s touch. The smooth, crisp Polaroid positive acts as a mirror, filling in the silhouette-as-color opposite, drawing with light anew. * Photogram on Polacolor Negative Print/Polacolor Dye Diffusion Positive Print by Ellen Carey Contact: ecarey@hartford.edu