Vittoria Gerardi, The Lethegraph

Vittoria Gerardi

The Lethegraph

On The Potentiality of the Photographic Image 

Contents

Preface Prologue 1. The Word “Latent” 2. A Latent State of Being Hic et Nunc

3. The Actual Structure of the Visible Image A photograph

4. A Vegetal State of Seeing Subject - Object

5. The Potential Structure of the Latent Image: As It Is - As It Appears

Lethegraph Space

Alethegraph Time

Epilogue

Bibliography

On Methodology The point of departure of the analysis is a practice based on tradition. In a time dominated by immediate access to the visible image, the “old” photographic technique offers the opportunity to ponder on the invisible.

The theoretical framework of a discourse on the latent image is built starting from its etymological background. This origin is further shaped through the theories of three main thinkers from the ancient, modern and contemporary philosophical world: the metaphysical notions of “potentiality” and “actuality” as defined by Aristotle, the existential concept of truth(presence/visibility) as defined by Heidegger, and the bio-political concept of “poiesis” as defined by Agamben. In parallel, the concept of latency is enriched through its declination on selected spheres: phenomenological theories on photography enhance the discussion on the visible, seen as a combination of presence and absence; neurobiological research on vegetal beings reveals the green organisms as actants of latency; the technological revolution of the digital image is argued as the disappearance of latency; the quantum interpretation of time-space comes in analogy to the one in which the latent image exists; the theological concept of nudity as denudation is used to foster the idea that the act of seeing happens outside the visible image. In the process of supporting or arguing those concepts, theory is interlaced with practice. In a continuous flux from thinking to acting, the concept of latency gradually transforms into a physical condition that speaks about the time we are living (April 29, 2020).

No one knew what was concealed within the underground of the ancient Oscan peninsula 1 at the foot of the Vesuvius. And when they walked, they believed to step on the surface of a city that is yet to be raised. The man who first digged into it, he doubted, and prolonged the discovery. Others did the same, and doubted. Until man’s time revealed the photograph of an image that just before was only latent. But, she is still Diaphanes. Transparency is the color that enables us to see, the essence of visibility: “Its nature in act is light, its potential is in its darkness” 2.

1

The ancient ruin of Pompeii, whose first inhabitants is believed to be the Oscans

2

Agamben, The Existence of Potentiality, 180

“Lethegraph” is the poietic3 attempt for the pro-duction of an image that is the tangible voice of the dialectic of existence. Photography is the mode of its revelation.

The condition of latency does not only belong to photography, but it is the structure of every process of pro-duction, where this term is used specifically in its etymological meaning of “bringing into presence an absence”. Yet, the focus of the discussion will be photography as not enough has been said on the potentiality of the image that remains invisible. “Seulement latente”4 is the process before the apparition of the visible. What we see through the photograph has always been considered the fundamental subject and object of thought, while the “only latent” was just the practical preoccupation of fastening the time of its disappearance. From hours to seconds, from tangible to intangible. The progressive elimination of this state lead to define the visible from its appearance. But before writing the visible, what language does a photograph speak? The latent image reveals the potentiality for the invisible as the original structure of the visible: it is the perception of darkness as the possibility to see light, the condition of concealment as the possibility for unconcealment (aletheia), the absence as the possibility for a presence to manifest. She is the analogon5 of the condition of Being: the potential to act is the same potential to see. But, our existence is the very requirement of being visible, to act as to forget the latent image of our true self. “Lethegraph” is then the preservation of this potential not to act, potential for the invisible. It is the naked image of the potentiality of seeing.

However, if the Being would only be potential, there wouldn’t be such a thing called history. Temporality is the writing of human activity that comes through a gesture of dis-activation. To dis-activate is to acknowledge that a form (an act) will materialise that potential into an imprint to be passed on. In that brief moment, “Lethegraph” will become “Alethegraph”.

Agamben, Poiesis and Praxis, 43. The distinction between the term pro-duction and production references the chapter “Poiesis and Praxis” of Giorgio Agamben’s text “The Man Without Content”: pro-duction comes from the word poien and has the meaning of “bringing into presence an absence, disclosing the concealed”; production is the technical process through which an object is produced. In this context, the pro-duction of “Latent Image” means to bring the non 3

being into being, the invisible into the visible. On the contrary, the unreflective eye is a production in the sense that is the objective consequence of the technical development of the latent image (from tangible through analogue photography to intangible through digital photography).

4

Barthes, Image Music Text

5

Le Constitutionnel

The word “Latent” The word “latent” comes from the Greek lēthē, concealment. Lēthē was also the name of Oblivion, the goddess, and the name of the river of forgetfulness, whose course flows in the Underworld of Hades. For the Greeks, the notion of concealment was opposite to the one of truth identified in the word a-letheia.

Heidegger will reintroduce this term in relation to the unconcealment of Being: it is an act of disclosure constituted by the dialectical nature of truth, which is that of both opening and hiding. “Concealment deprives aletheia of disclosure yet does not render it steresis (privation); rather, concealment preserves what is most proper to aletheia as its own”6. Concealment is the horizon that precedes and maintains itself in the manifestation of every being.

In Aristotelian terms, this dialectic is expressed as principle of motion through the concepts of potentiality and actuality. To be potential means having on the basis of which one can also not bring its knowledge into actuality. One of the examples that the philosopher brings to the argument is that of the architect: to be an architect is the potential to build, but an architect is potential insofar he has also the potential to not build. For Aristotle, “All potentiality is impotentiality of the same and with respect to the same”7. The originary structure of potentiality is to be in relation with its own privation: impotentiality is meant as a contradiction internal to potentiality that allows the same to transform itself into actuality, into form. Thus, the term aletheia is not separate from the potentiality of being latent, but internal to it. It is the co-belonging of concealment and unconcealement that marks the experience of the truth of Being: “If sensation did not have the potentiality both for actuality and for not Being actual and if it were always actual, it would never be able to perceive darkness, nor could it ever hear silence” 8. It is within this notion of potentiality that the meaning of the word “latent” signifies an existential condition.

However, this word, that quietly pervades both human and natural actions, has commonly been understood in its inactivity, rather than in its potential.

6

Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, 140

7

Agamben, Potentiality for Darkness, 181

8

Ibid., 182

It is said that animals go into a “state of lethargy”. This dormant self-regulated condition acts as a mode of preservation during the hostile seasons. Similarly, so do plants.

For humans, on the contrary, this term is only used in reference to a pathology and not as a possible mode of existence. It is, as if, we “can” because we “act”, and not because we also “can not”. From this modern understanding of man as agent, whom who acts, comes the crisis of his poietical status on earth.

This interpretation has been integrated to such a degree that a different comprehension of the matter is not expected. However, in earlier times, the Greeks made a clear distinction between Poiesis and Praxis: Poiesis is “to produce” in the sense of a-letheia, bringing into presence and absence; while Praxis (agere) is a principle of movement that marks life, where “the capacity for work and its foundation is inherent in the very character of man as active natural being that is, as endowed with vital instincts and appetites”9. The distinction eclipsed to the point of reducing all of man’s doing as Praxis. At the same time, Poiesis became creative activity. In this fashion, the negative character that is ascribed to the word “latent” is not etymological, but functional. Latency is understood neither as the myth of Oblivion nor in its ambivalent existence of lēthē-aletheia, but rather as mere inactivity, the physiological inertia of lethargy as the absence of praxis.

Not dissimilar is the understanding of the latent image as for the first time appeared in photography in relation to the visible image.

The latent image is an invisible image pro-duced by the effect of light on a photosensitive matter (paper or film), which can be rendered visible only through subsequent chemical development. The invisible image is latent in the sense that it has the potential of being a visible image. Therefore, it is potential and impotential at the same time, it is both visible and invisible. Yet, this potential has never been considered in its existential character, but rather confined to an interval where the only preoccupation was that of fastening the time of its disappearance.

Thus, a discourse on the latent image is functional for the revaluation of its understanding, both inwards in the photographic image and outwards in the domain of human praxis.

9

Agamben, Poiesis and Praxis, 71

A Latent State of Being Hic et Nunc

“I came back to Italy when forced isolation had already started. Italy was the first country in Europe to be affected by the pandemic and deaths were growing exponentially every hour. To come back seemed to mean to be running towards death and in London I was believed to be insane. The reality is I am Italian. The British were still convinced that the virus would have never come so far to reach them. However, it was just a matter of calculation. I took the last flight to Venice before they closed the borders. And, after two months, I am still here in isolation.

At first, they were talking about quarantine and then forty days had gone. We are still in quarantine here without any new date for going back to work. The virus is forcing us to stay at home and to go out only for basic necessities such as food and wine for Italians.

I am in a place which is not quite like a home: a warehouse, or to put it more finely, an artist’ studio. The warehouse is located in the industrial area of Noventa di Piave, province of Venice, a small village that people in the honourable Britannia wouldn’t even know existed. However, in its own small way, Noventa is a cultural and green area. After all, history flows where the Piave flows. Nearby, there are other warehouses: construction companies, factories, food industries.

All amidst fallow fields, worked only by the sheep that come all the way down from Belluno to pasture here. There is a field right in front of me and honestly, I have to say that I have never looked at it before. I have never looked at it as I felt there was nothing to look at. After all, it is more of a barren dry field that a bucolic poem telling stories about love and runs in a bush or under a tree. But now, that I can’t go elsewhere and there is nothing else to look at, I capture from that field something unseen before. They are long and subtle. Some grow within the cracks of the asphalt strip that separates the warehouse from the field.

Others grow green and free in the same field. How is possible that I have never stopped to look at a blade of grass before? And here is one, after taking it in my hand suddenly the word “latent” comes to my mind”.

There are events in history for which humans are forced to interrupt their activity.

In the present moment, an event is affecting humanity as whole forcing it to reconsider the very ability on which man has based its entire existence: movement. A virulent and invisible agent is forcing humans to stillness, making them behave almost like vegetal beings. That is to say, living, communicating and observing within the dimension of the invisible. Unexpectedly, the rather abstract notion of latency becomes a tangible physical condition. Through this experience, to look at the plants is to see potential actors of latent images.

Avoiding any botanical interpretation of the subject, latency is photographically

framed to the simple and humble form of a blade of grass. The one that grows both in an open field or through the cracks of the asphalt, both in freedom or in confinement.

The Actual Structure of The Visible Image A photograph. The word itself says everything there is to say about its nature: “drawing with light”.

In ancient times, this was the image that emerged from the observation of a natural optical phenomenon: the camera obscura. It occurs when an outside scene is projected through a small hole of a dark chamber into its opposite wall.

At first, this was recorded as the projection of a solar eclipse through a leaf canopy into the ground. This mechanism was then used by draftsman, who traced the contours of the projected image to properly produce “drawings from light”. In the early Eighteenth Century, the desire became that of fixing the image produced through the camera obscura so as to develop the eternal memory of spontaneous moments of nature without the interference of man’s subjective hand. When it did, it captured “the most fleeting of our illusions, that which the apostle and the philosopher and the poet have alike used as the type of instability and unreality”. The first was a Daguerrotype, so-called from the name of its former inventor. In his long correspondences with Nicéphore Niépce, with whom he set in partnership in 1829, Daguerre exposes, with an exactitude that is still contemporary, the procedures for the creation of a photograph: “A plate prepared in this manner (photo-sensitized with Bitumen of Judea) may be exposed immediately to the action of light; but, even after prolonged exposure, nothing will indicate that an image really exists because the impression remains imperceptible. It is, therefore, a question of developing the picture, and this can only be accomplished by the aid of a solvent”. The process that fixed the first photograph two centuries ago has been perfected through time, but the triadic structure that defines this analogon remained the same (Fig 1):

(Fig 1)

However, only two of these three elements became the object of analysis for any photographic theory that was about to emerge: its mechanical process of reproduction and the photograph as a new kind of visible image. The former has been concerned with the industrialization and mass distribution of images, while the latter investigates the phenomenological structure of photography.

What does the eye experience when looking at a photograph?

The visible image has been identified by Roland Barthes in the interfuit. This is a spatial discrepancy between what was there and what is no longer here. It also means a temporal rupture between the past of its happening and the presence of its viewing. The moment in which the subject of the photographic image is seen, it becomes “the having-been-there” as “the illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then”. This is the phenomenological perception of the unreality of a photograph as elucidated in “The Rhetoric of the Image”: the visible comes always with a privation. This privation is the invisible to the eye that derives from the temporal condition of not being there, but here. Barthes’ interpretation of the photographic message culminates in the distinction between a denotational and a connotational meaning: while the first is the “real” character of the image given by its continuous process of capturing an instant from reality, the second involves a sociological sphere for which signs are interpreted differently across cultures. This argument is further explored by John Berger who understands the idea of looking as political act: because “the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled”, is not possible to understand a photograph referencing only photography. Yet, when and where we see something will affect what we see. Therefore, the “ambiguity” of a photograph is expressed in the very act of looking at it.

For Berger as well, the photograph always presents itself with two messages.

This time, one message concerns the event photographed and the other

concerns a “shock of discontinuity”. The shock isolates preserves and presents a moment taken from a continuum, where the abyss in which the visible is situated is pointing always to the invisible. In this sense, a photograph could be seen as potential as its latent image. But, in the photograph, this invisible, rather than a phenomenological perception, is more of a logical deduction that observes the temporal difference between what is there in the image as what is not there anymore outside of it; instead, in the latent image, this constitutes a physical condition that the subject who is looking experiences as the tangible real. The photograph takes on this potentiality later as act, the latent image situates this potentiality in its potential of Being-there. Disclosure comes as a reversed process of seeing through the latent image. In fact, concealing is the only possibility for aletheia to manifest itself. It is not through the visible that comes the experience of the invisible, but on the contrary, it is the invisible itself that enables disclosure, seeing the truth of the visible.

A Vegetal State of Seeing Subject - Object

Western philosophical and theological thought inherited the idea that vegetal beings are “creatures on the edge between living and non living”. In De Anima, Aristotle analyses the kinds of souls possessed by living creatures distinguishing three fundamental functions: vegetative, sensitive and rational. The first is the basic ability of reproduction and growth. The second is the ability of perception and sensation. The third represent the intellect. He attributed to plants the first soul only, to animals the first two, and to humans all three. This division has been integrated in Western culture to the point of structuring hierarchically the order of creation, placing the vegetale at the bottom of the pyramid and the homo studiosus on its summit.

Only centuries later, through the natural and biological studies of Charles Darwin, the distinction theorised by the Greeks was disproved, revealing the complexity of vegetal organisms. However, it is significant that the current medical expression used to identify the loss of physical and sensitive perception in humans is called “vegetative state”. For some reason, plants are still latent.

Their physical diversity from the animal world makes them invisible to the eye.

Somehow, stillness is synonym of inanimate. In spite of this prejudice over the “other”, contemporary neurobiological studies show how the immobility of plants is what constitute their resistance allowing them to structure a decentralised interconnected system that works on the intelligence of the radicals: “each root tip works in a network with all the others, and even when it loses 90% or more of its root system, a plant is able to survive and continue communicating”10. Without organs, they live for centuries and millennia in a “clear advantage over animals, who would quickly perish should they lose the functions of their one brain”11. In this way, the timescale of plants’ life becomes such different from that of humans, that from a decade to another the change in the growth of a tree might not be noticeable. This condition of apparent stillness enables observation: they do not see by looking, but through a wider understanding of sensing the quality and quantity of light. The potential of seeing embodied by the plant is analogue to the one perceived inside photography: seeing does not only come through the eye, similarly the visible does not only come through the image. The photographic process enacted by the vegetal blurs the distinction between subject and object, revealing light as a

10

Mancuso, Plant Revolution

11

Ibidem

synthesis of real and written. In following this allegory offered by Nature, the latent image writes through the invisible becoming “Lethegraph”.

Latent Lines. Invisible Lines. As if they had always been seen as curves. Silently, they reveal not colours, but nuances. Light-grey, grey, dark-grey. Honestly, they reveal not similarities, but dierences. Small, medium, large. Lightly, they reveal not the whole, but parts.

A blade of grass is collected and exposed under the darkroom’s enlarger instead of the negative. In this way, the mortal matrix of reality is replacing what would have been the reproducible moment captured through the camera.

The photographs documenting the gesture behind the creation of “Lethegraph” become haiku: the subject disappears to leave space to the object, the event.

Like in the short Japanese poem, the photograph suspends the message opening to the potentiality of seeing a future image that aims to be as silent as 4’33”12 of music.

12

Cage, 4’33”

The Potential Structure of The Latent Image: As It Is - As It Appears

The co-presence of lēthē-aletheia is what defines the potential of the latent image: until the light exposure that is imprinted on it remains undeveloped, this image will be visible and invisible at the same time.

This dialectical existence introduces a potential dimension of the order of quantum mechanics, in which this state is known as “superposition”. The interpretation is proposed by Heiseinberg as “The Uncertainty Principle” in which the very state of atoms and electrons is defined by the possibility of being simultaneously in one place and in another. The only possibility to know if the particle is there or not there, comes through observation: “when nothing disturbs it (the atom), it is not in any precise place”13. In quantum mechanics, this indeterminacy only applies to things that exist on a microscopic or macroscopic level. Whereas on a human scale, this phenomenon appears as invisible as potentiality itself. Potentiality is, perhaps, this superposition that leaves naked the real, without the clothing of one observation or the other, which is to say: without the decision that will transform potentiality into actuality,

lēthē into

aletheia.

That is why, the latent image reveals itself as inapparent. It is the naked image of the privation of clothing, where “privation is like a face (eidos)”14. However, this face has always been interpreted as sin in Western culture. The knowledge of nudity comes as a privation of the clothing of grace in the moment that “the eyes of both (Adam and Eve) were opened”15 and they could see their naked bodies.

This kind of visibility that Adam and Eve experienced after the sin is like seeing the visible before the invisible, the disclosure of aletheia before its concealment.

Therefore, there must be another kind of nudity that precedes and where this mode of seeing nudity configures only as denudation of the clothing of grace (the signature).

This is understood by Giorgio Agamben as “naked corporeality”, that he proposes for a revaluation for man’s political status of earth: “The original nudity, naked corporeality, immediately disappears underneath the clothing of grace to then reappears as natura lapsa only at the moment of sin, that is the moment of

13

Rovelli, Second Lesson

14

Agamben, The Act of Impotentiality, 183

15

Agamben, Nudity, 52

denudation”16. To return to original nudity is to return to the medium of knowledge. This is only possible if the apparatus that makes one perceive nudity as privation is neutralised. The condition of nudity as privation of clothing is in fact the potentiality of the opening to truth: “It is in this way that, in nudity without veils, appearance itself appears and displays itself as infinitely inapparent, infinitely free of secret” 17. It is being concealed for the possibility of a disclosure. It is “pure visibility” and “presence”18 by being invisibility and absence. This is the image that having darkness allows for the drawing of light.

“Lethegraph” is this naked image of potentiality: exposed to the dialectic of existential opposites, it remains potency by virtue of its darkness, undeveloped in the preserving modality of the dark chamber.

16

Ibid., 64

17

Ibid., 81

18

Ibidem

Lethegraph In front of her: Tabula Rasa. She has no name nor figure. But She is the name and the figure. She is naked white, naked image. She is there, in the there of its Being. She is Aletheia by being Lethe; darkness by being light; visible by being invisible. This is the image of potentiality: the Latent Image. Or a Third Image, only sound. But in fact, She is more than that. She is tangible. She has space and time. More than that, She is the space and time of its Being. In front of her, you might ask: What is there to see? Always Already Hidden. She is Trace, the origin of a non origin. Always Self-Transcendence. What does She writes? She is the language of visibility. She allows us to see what seeing means. It is an act of ex-istence, of being outside by being inside. She is unreachable, because we do not see that She is not just invisible.

Space As Phenomenology investigated the decisive moment of the photograph, Semiotics raised the idea of its adherence to reality from a linguistic prospective.

This idea was still understood in regards to the analogue process, where the relation between signifier and signified is continuos. A photograph, by being the direct imprint of the light of reality, indicates an inside that is the referent of its outside. The photographic index is precisely this existential analogy of space and of time between reality and its image. It means that to decode an image is unnecessary as it carries the signifier within the signified. Photography is then unable to observe what is the ultimate act of art: to alter reality.

However, she found a revolutionary redeemer. The ability to transform the visible into the invisible was attributed to digital photography at the time of its appearance.

The new image was conceived as a discontinuous process of recording light, while in fact, the heart of this apparatus is just as analogue as the previous one.

In digital photography, the system that proceeds to the representation of light is continuous. But, while the negative preserves this information, the digital system does not. What could be called the “first analogue image” goes through a further process of discrete transformation (or latency), “where the information are selected so to convert the signal from continuous to discontinuous”19. Thus, the inaccurate conclusion that the digital image does not adhere to reality and therefore it becomes cultural act. The revolution played by digital photography exists, but not in terms of realism. Every image created, through adherence or manipulation (index or icon, referent or code, continuous or discontinuous) does belong to the visible. But, while analogue photography in order to produce the visible goes through the physically invisible of the latent image, digital photography got rid of this tangible interstice and transformed it into an immaterial temporal fragment. Yet, the existential character of the latent image is characterised by the fact that the space of its being is its ex-istence.

Almost one hundred years ago, the ontological depth of a photograph was delineated by Andre Bazin by relating it to true realism: “A photograph is a specific moment in time and in space, where the relationship with the world is its nature and value”20. Although this referred to the reality of the visible to the gaze, Bazin described something that inevitably belongs to the process of pro-duction of the invisible: “The aesthetic quality of photographs is to be found in its 19

Marra, L’Immagine Infedele

20

Bazin, The Ontology of The Photographic Image, 238

capacity to lay bare realities”21. If the realism of photography lays bare reality, it means that the visible appears for what it is in its being.

However, this nudity is not original nudity, but only a signature. The invisible remains inscrutable if only seen through the visible. It is through a reversed process of seeing that is possible to arrive to disclosure. Then, the original tangible space and the perceptible time for photography “to ex-ist” is the latent image. This is the space that cannot be but lost within the digitalised image.

There, darkness is never present physically, but only behind the virtual sampling and quantisation of numeric data. The latent image of photography is not potential only for its indistinguishable relation between presence and absence, but because it is itself the there of its Being. Lethargy is not only a condition, but also a position. It is not possible to see Niepce’s original plate outside its continuously stabilized oxygen-free environment. In a similar, yet opposite way, “Lethegraph” exists in the tangible paper of its immanent manifestation, where the camera obscura figures as the parabolic space of its contradiction and in which “the only possible point of orientation is the vertigo in which outside and inside, immanence and transcendence are indistinguishable”22.

21

Ibid., 242

22

Agamben, Absolute Immanence, 228

Alethegraph

Now, She the Discloser. One Time Alone, She reveals. Now, She is written. She is the Line of motion. It is an act of e-motion, of being outside. She acts because now She is history.

Time In following nature’s project, the latent image returns to a kind of tabula rasa: the writing tablet of a possible revelation. As writing is formed by lines in its smaller components, the line itself becomes the primitive gesture of a light-revelation, where a brush soaked with chemical developer will trace its irregular path.

The disclosure of concealment comes as the manifestation of the temporality of Being: through actuality, lēthē will become aletheia, and it will remain in permanent relation with it.

Performed in the dark, it opens to the light and continues to absorb Nature’s way of creating, where the quality and quantity of light gradually nuance the line and its latent space on the sides. By transforming light into chemical reaction, photography becomes photo-synthesis.

At first, the print turns into yellow; then into pink and then into blue. In its final stage, the blue turns into a warm skin colour and the black and white line turns into an epiphanic green, stabilising itself in this colour. “Alethegraph� becomes an event revealing the power of things to unlock themselves not only through human vision, but through their own process of creation.

The Cylinder Is The Face of Its Seal and The Narrative of Its Opening It is now more clear the opening image of the discussion: the ancient Pompeii acts the dialectical nature of the latent image, where concealed and unconcealed, hidden and discovered, constitute the dual nature of the possibility of being. Until there will be latent images to reveal, man’s life will be distinguished by temporality, that kind of existence where to act becomes to write the image of history. It is in this sense that is necessary to preserve the latent image, but at the same time, to dis-activate its potential. Thus, it exists as the unconquerable dialectic of the unity of life that constitutes the Being in time.

Lethe and aletheia are sealed in the shape of the cylinder in which their face appears as one: that of privation. Yet, they open in a dialectical narrative in order to act in time the image of motion (Fig 2).

(Fig 2)

Thus, “Lethegraph� does not want to interpret an utopian condition of being. It is a praise to the cannot as the very condition of to act. Actuality is not erased, but introduced in its temporality, which is the writing of history. Being is potentiality, but through acting we bequeath. The work of art is not confined to a conceptualisation of the first, but rather it preserves, and recognises that to act is a necessary historic gesture.

List of Illustrations

Vittoria Gerardi, Blade of Grass (close up) , gelatin silver print, 40 x 30 cm

Vittoria Gerardi, Capturing, gelatin silver print, 40 x 30 cm

Vittoria Gerardi, Exposing, gelatin silver print, 40 x 30 cm

Vittoria Gerardi, photograph of Lethegraph, gelatin silver print, 40 x 30 cm, unique

Vittoria Gerardi, Tracing (Stage 1) , gelatin silver print, 40 x 30 cm

Vittoria Gerardi, Tracing (Stage 2, Stage 3), gelatin silver print, 40 x 30 cm

Vittoria Gerardi, Alethegraph (Stage 1, Stage 2, Stage 3, Stage 4), gelatin silver prints, 50 x 40 cm each, unique

Vittoria Gerardi, Alethegraph (Green Stage), gelatin silver print, 50 x 40 cm, unique

Vittoria Gerardi, Alethegraph, (close up Stage 1, close up Stage 2, close up Stage 3, close up Stage 4), gelatin silver print, 50 x 40 cm each, unique

Vittoria Gerardi, Alethegraph, (close up Green Stage), gelatin silver print, 50 x 40 cm, unique

Old Syrian, Stone-Cylinder Seal (and modern impression), hematite, 2cm, Syria, 1820-1730 B.C.

ILFORD Delta 3200 black and white 35mm film

Vittoria Gerardi, Walking, slide of ILFORD Delta 3200 black and white 35mm film

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