Lumen MagazineIssue 8

LUMEN ISSU E#8

F i on nbharr Ó Sú i l l e a b h á i n Dan Isaac Wallin M i ch eal Jac k so n Robert Hutin sk i G i orgio Es p o si t o

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L U ME N m a gazi ne co nt r i bu t o r s F ron t C ov e r F i o n n bharr Ó S úille abháin & Alex B oyd Dan Isaac Wallin M i ch ea l J a ckson R ob ert Hu t inski G i o rgio E sp osit o

Lu men Ma ga zine E d i t or - G a b riel V a n I ngen C l e ar V iew Hou se N ot t ingh a m UK w w w . l um enm a ga zine. com

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HOW TO SUBMITT TO LUMEN MAGAZINE Digital Submission When sending your digital files please prepare your images as 300dpi Tiff files, Mac compatible and at least 10x8 inches.

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On the Cover

Rankin by Fiionnbharr o Suilleabhain & Alex Boyd

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Analog Vol 1 Submission When sending your digital files please prepare your images as 300dpi Tiff files, Mac compatible and at least 10x8 inches.

Please ensure you label yor work and include an artist statement, bio and full contact details.

CONTENTS

Fionnbharr Ó Súilleabháin

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Dan Isaac Wallin

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Micheal Jackson

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Robert Hutinski

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Giorgio Esposito

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Symbols & Archetype

Large format Polaroid

Childs Landscape

Ecce Homo

Pinhole

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5202

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F i on n b h a r r Ó Súille a bhá in If wet-collodion is currently seen as an explosion in historic process practice, driven by a reaction to digital, then calotype is but a small candle in the corner. And you can quite happily develop a calotype by the light of a candle.

This summer saw a small gathering of ten calotype practitioners at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire. The Abbey was the home of William Henry Fox Talbot, who gets the credit for discovering the calotype process.

It is Talbot’s 1835 image of the Oriel window at Lacock Abbey, taken with one of his tiny “mousetrap” cameras, that stands as the earliest negative on paper. The meeting, called Calopalooza, was named by the organisers Rachel Nordstrom and Roger Watson. It was the first meeting of The Calotype Society, which began as a flickr group started by Richard Cynan Jones in 2010 and now has over 170 members, though it seems unlikely that there are more than about 15 active practitioners worldwide.

Somebody at Calopalooza remarked that you need to be masochistic to enjoy making calotypes. You certainly need a lot of patience. I happen to be very impatient but I find the discipline required to use the process and the amount of time involved gives plenty of time for reflection that I otherwise wouldn’t take.

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R a n k i n at R ock H ouse (D igita l inve r sion of 8x10� c a lotype )

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M os teiro do s J e r o n i m o s ( 8 x 1 0 ” s a l t - p r i n t f r o m cal o t y p e)

What was striking amongst the participants was that almost everyone was using a different calotype variant: Talbot’s original process (Talbotype), Baldus’s process, Le Gray’s Isinglass waxed-paper process, Charles Long’s waxed-paper process, Arsène Pélegry’s dry-paper process and even a direct-positive process published in 1845 by Hans Thøger Winther. It is not a calotype process at all as it uses dichromate, but has recently been translated into English from the original Norwegian and resurrected as a process

by Włodek Witek in Oslo.

I started making calotypes at the end of 2011 using the simplest wet-process technique described in Alan Greene’s excellent book, Primitive Photography. I wanted a process that I could take into the centre of Lisbon, where I am currently living.

Having tried this with wet-collodion I found it quite limiting because the dark-box I needed to take with me necessitated working close to the car. I wanted a more portable process. Greene’s book is a great place to start but it is more reward-

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ing going back to the original literature and trying more sophisticated processes, of which there are a fair few variants. I currently use a dry paper process described by Arsène Pélegry in his La Photographie des Peintres, des Voyageurs et des Touristes (1879). Preparing the paper is a lengthy procedure but no lengthier than a waxed-paper process and I use it because of its convenience.

I’m currently working on a series called Human Mist using Pélegry’s process. The work is concerned with the ephemeral nature of our lives.

In the longer exposures required by the dry paper processes any movement is averaged out and appears as what early practitioners referred to as “human mist”. The mist represents traces of the activities made by any number of people during the exposure, recording between 6 to 60 minutes of their lives. The overall effect though is the total absence of human presence; they were there but now they are gone, leaving only a misty trail as evidence they were ever there.

When working with any historic process there is an inevitable reflection on the lives of the origi-

Le Château d e Ch a m b o r d ( 8 x 1 0 ” c a l o t y p e )

nal practitioners as you examine the images they made. You cannot help but reflect on your own mortality. How many images will you leave behind?

In a collision of old and new technologies I met another historical process photographer, Alex Boyd, through twitter. When I say “met” I mean that in the old-fashioned sense. We actually met up and made a calotype in the summer of 2012 in the Glasgow Botanic Gardens. This led to us collaborating in an ITV documentary to make a calotype of the portrait photographer Rankin, which we made at Rock House in March 2013.

We were very lucky to get any image at all given the low light levels. It was 3C as we stood there in the little courtyard with the snow settling on us during the 5-minute exposure. Rock House was the studio of David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson where they both lived and worked from 1843 until Adamson’s untimely death in 1848. In that short 4-year collaboration they produced a vast body of superb work, being the first to visit what would become established genres in photog-

raphy; portraiture, documentary and landscape.

They even made the first image of a hangover.

Boyd and I have another calotype collaboration currently underway, in part inspired by the work of Hill & Adamson. Coincidentally we started this project exactly 170 years after the two men were first introduced in 1843. Obscured by the heat of the fanfare that will erupt next year to celebrate the 175th anniversary of the official commencement of photography in 1839, there will be ten or so little candles flickering away in various corners, accompanied by the smell of gallic acid and vinegar.

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Opposite page: The Oriel Window, Lacock Abbey (8x10” calotype)

Lily P ond, Lac o c k Ab b e y ( Di g i t a l i n v e r s i o n o f 8 x 1 0 ” cal o t y p e)

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Dan Isaac Wallin In the creative aspect of his work, Dan Isaac Wallin has a love of Polaroid. He prefers to work with a simple SX-70 or 4x5” large format camera, using long expired Polaroid film. Wallin gently and carefully treats and mistreats the Polaroid film while it is developing, until he gets the soft ‘other-world’ look, that is the signature style of his work.

His series mainly show outdoor motifs from the Swedish countryside. The colours and expressions change with the seasons, and behind these beautiful images there rests a serious, calm and poetic sensitivity.

Wallin presents journeys from the places of childhood. His memories become dreamlike sequences; from the blue of Bohuslän to the black and white of Israel. Mystery cuts through the nostalgic imagery and awakens questions within the viewer.

Wallin has been a photographer for 15 years and was educated at Biskops-Arnö in Sweden.

His workprocess is slow and painstaking. He often uses large format cameras, even with his freelance projects. He is enthusiastic about alternative printing processes like Gum Bichromate, cyanotype and salt prints, for which he also offers courses. Wallin has done numerous group and solo exhibitions, most recently at the Dalsland Museum of Art and at Eugene & William in Gothenburg. He has also received scholarships for his photographic work.

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Dan Isaac Wallin born 1977.

I live in Gothenburg on the west coast of Sweden.

From 2003 I’ve been working full time with photography. I was a freelance photographer at the same time I was running a small analog shop and gallery during the years of 20032008. During that time I held a lot of workshops in alternative photography processes. I used to work a lot with van dyke brown, salt prints and gum dichromate prints. I loved it when it could take up to a week to make a gum print. I’m very lucky to know some old photographers in Sweden that are world famous in these processes, and they have been my teachers.

Since last year I only do some freelance work and mainly try to focus on my art photography, projects, books and exhibitions. 2012 I released my first art book “Steps on snow, dust on the lips” which sold very good. The picture’s I show here

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is some of the work you will find in the book.

I’m trying to freeze a world that I feel like I belong in myself.

A dreamy melancholic feeling, where my mind often winds up. I return a lot to my roots, and many of my pictures are from journeys I took as a child. From the blue of Sweden to the black and white desert landscape of Israel.

My pictures are for me a reflection on the human need for silence and reflection. Far away are the quick impressions and the daily stress of everyday life. Left are our original values, roots and tranquility. What is more elementary then the sea, the mountains and the earth?

Philosophy is not static: gravel roads, bridges and waves move us forward.

There are clear contrasts between regions, but it is for me a

strong bond and similes between them. As aquarelles flow, the colors, landscapes, and images flow together. The wide open space flows into nothing – or everything – depending on how you interpret them. Landscapes echo of emptiness, but beneath the surface you always feel or sense the human presence. That’s what I’m looking for with my photography, the traces of myself in my childhood places. The presence of the person I was.

Everything is so changeable in the landscape. If you stay in the same place for long time and really focus, you can see it.

I love that feeling. And no day is the other alike. For me it´s almost like meditation to be out in nature, and to photograph it and translate it into my way of seeing it.

People are interesting. Every person has a story to tell and

that´s so wonderful. Some people are harder then others to get close to. That’s why I mostly take portraits with 4x5 cameras because it relaxes the person and you slowly get closer to them.

I want to get inside the person and make all their inner thoughts come out.

Of course there is a connection between landscapes and people. Everything is the same and everything goes together and no place or person is the other one alike.

The last 4 years I´ve only used Polaroid film, and mostly very old expired Polaroid film. I´ve spent a lot of money during these years to stock up on film, but now I´m safe for many years and that feels great. I love all the different ways I can work with the film. There´s no stop in the process and I gently

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treat and mistreat the Polaroid film while it´s developing until I get the soft ”other world” look that I´m looking for. And the colors are just outstanding on the old Polaroid film. It feels more like a painting then a photograph sometimes

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T h e G r e a t M a n n P oint A t S unset

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A Childs Landscape Michael Jackson ‘A Child’s Landscape’ came about through a number of unconnected events that all seemed to be in my mind at the same time. As with much of my work there is a personal event that sparks a thought, and that thought starts a life of its own and grows.

I find that discoveries and experiments with other projects often provide thoughts and ideas that splinter off to feed new projects. In this way I feel that my work as a whole is bound together like a big family tree.

The project itself took form over a long period of experimenting and playing with certain ideas. It was very much trial and error. I often think that a landscape photograph should within itself express the photographer’s awe - but as I worked and created with the images a more concrete way of working started to form and I began to realise that as adults the real excitement and adventure of a landscape can be forgotten - but for a child a hill is not just a hill - it is a fortress, a castle, a mountain.

A child’s imagination creates its own landscape. And so I began to try to change my way of thinking - I started to think of pirates, of explorers - I tried to go back and recapture my childhood excitement which I had so quickly lost as an adult. And with that change of thinking came the project as it is today. Not an adult’s landscape - but a Child’s Landscape.

Poppit Sands work is available from Chris Beetles Fine Photographs in London www.mgjackson.co.uk

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T h e D evil s Needl es At Sunset

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S h ee r # 1

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E lep h ant

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F i rst S u n

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Be a r Po i nt

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S ent i n a l Pea k

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P i c to n M o u nt

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Th e G re at Ma n n Poi nt

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Robert Hutinski “Ecce Homo or a problem of individual consciousness and the universality

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The title of this series of photos is of course taken from the Gospel of John. This fact is hardly a coincidence and it has a logical succession on which we can and have to contemplate since such is our duty, as we shall see at the very end of this writing.

So Jesus came forth, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them: “Behold, the man!” (John 19:5) We may thus say without hesitation that Robert Hutinski took upon himself as a photographer the challenging task of speaking, through his series of photos, about the man, about the human, about the very human, and about the world, of what is at the very core of the world.

What is very human is necessarily committed to the universal. The photographer is aware of this and he is seeking to grasp his role in this world, his universal duty which is simultaneously the duty of each and every human being. The universal is a problem for any human being, not merely for philosophers and artists. And this comment should perhaps begin by stating what Descartes and Locke were already aware of: the sensible, the perceptible, is not a characteristic or a property of the objects in the world or even of the world itself; it is rather a relation, a set of relations because of which the world is layered and wrinkled, as Leibniz would have put it.

The twist in thinking is very important: Robert Hutinski’s series is correlated to this twist and this, too, is exceptionally important. Is simply means that a photographer does not take photos of the world or the objects within it as if they were a given; rather, he takes photos of relations, relationships, wrinkles, layers – something that is not and cannot be a given. In other words: Robert does precisely what is at the gist of human awareness of the world. We must not be misled into thinking that awareness reflects the world and the objects that have always been out there.

Far from it: the world only exists insofar as consciousness transcends in the relation with it. Therefore, consciousness cannot be static, although our everyday may give the impression of it being precisely such.

The world is not static; it is not a given. Consciousness is not static and it is not a given either.

In fact, consciousness is quite different than commonly imagined in the everyday awareness and Robert is looking to discover what consciousness is like beyond the clichés and dogmas; he is trying to understand the anonymous consciousness, the emancipated consciousness of the common people and their anonymity – consciousness that may indeed by manifest most clearly in catastrophes like the Holocaust. Consciousness is, namely, always a problem – it is not a solution. Yet the beauty of this problem lies in the fact that the problem of the universal is connected directly to the problem of consciousness, which is of course very logical. Being does not pre-date what

is presumably given; rather, it is given as something that pre-dates any given, to paraphrase the excellent French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux.

What does all this mean? It means that the relationship between thought and being, logically, pre-dates every empirical statement about the world. Hence, the world only has meaning if it is given to a thinking being. Robert is reaching with his photos into the heart of what is given to a thinking being. And what is at the heart of what is given? At the heart of what is given lies precisely something that is not given. Robert is exploring the consequences which are needless to say the most dramatically evident in a catastrophe like the Holocaust. The question is certainly valid: how could it have happened?

The answer to the question is anything but simple. What is at the heart of the world makes it always radically open.

Therefore, any though or conception of a photographer looking at the world with her own eyes is false. A photographer cannot view the world with his own eyes because the world does not exist in any other way than a multitude of possibilities which of course are not given because they are virtual. And the subject (for example a photographer) is not an entity or a given; she is a multitude of possibilities.

How, then, does a photographer view the world? A photographer does not view the world; he creates it. Virtual possibilities are allowed by norms which make it possible for us to know or learn something; to see or understand.

Without them, we cannot see nor understand anything. In this perspective, Robert is approaching philosophy as he is creating new egalitarian norms owing to which we are able to see and understand precisely because we never see the given. The condition of philosophy is recognition of the existence of something that is generically human and irreducible. In this perspective, every human being is equal to any other human being.

What is generically human is the condition of every possible world. Opening to the open, which is the fundamental emancipatory duty of an artist and a philosopher, can clash against obstacles that cannot be surpassed, which in turn can lead to apocalypse.

The objective of photography and philosophy is therefore radically the same: transformation of subjectivity, a new subjective position. Yet this transformation is not to take place in the world; rather it should occur in such manner as to make the (different, better) world possible. The backside of the insight about what is at the heart of reality is of course the story of the human ability to reduce what is irreducible. The Holocaust is nothing bit a gigantic attempt to constrict the human down to something inhuman.

The Holocaust is therefore a machine entirely devoid of life. Robert is using the terrifying effects of its operation.

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The Ecce Homo Series is thus at the same time about the human and about what Nietzsche called overhuman.

A human is the only living creature that can destroy what is at the core of the world. Robert’s photos therefore do not involve simulated good-looking people or romantic scenes, because he unceasingly talks about the Holocaust as a machine, and about people within it.

We also discover in the photos what is characteristic of Wagner’s music. In his dramas, Wagner talks throughout about tanatos, the instinct of death which is eternity, infinity of suffering of human beings, paradoxical suffering for which one does not die, which of course means that such life is immensely worse than death. For this very reason, Wagner’s music does not pursue any previously developed program. Rather, it is exploring what is beyond the stage on which attractive illusions can come to life for the spectacle-seeking spectators, which can lead to demonization of the world; indeed, it can lead to what happened before the blinded masses in the nineteen thirties. In such perspective, Wagner said with his music, music was an appealing setting for illusions that obscure the everyday misery of the people.

Robert Hutinski adds with his photos: I am not interested in everyday life entangled in the phantasmal frames; I have not interest in the pathos covering the drama of life; I am interested in the drama, and I am interested in the universal in the sense of openness of the world that can always be recognized in the details of what we call human. Robert’s photos should then be viewed through details and in detail.

Robert is, therefore, interested in the human beyond all imposed notions and media-supported clichés about it. He is interested in what is modest, for what is truly human is always modest – as Jesus Christ was modest – but it is also creative. Robert’s photos are modest and it is precisely this modesty that is also radical as it evokes convincing sentiments of what is at the core of the world which can never be given and which should not be given because every attempt of people to forcibly create such a given is always succeeded by a catastrophe, either individual or global.

People did not want Pontius Pilate to release Jesus after he failed to find him guilty of any crime. Pontius Pilate ordered him scourged and the soldiers weaved a crown of thorns and placed it on Jesus’ head, as we write (or rather read) in the gospel.

Robert spoke of this: about the eternally necessary apocalypse that delivers a double meaning. First: the moment when people become aware of the actuality, the truth of their lives. It is usually too late to do anything about it, which is why it is followed by either an individual or a general catastrophe; the revelation that it has been going on for a while, only nobody recognized it as

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such, or failed to take it seriously if they were aware of it. Second: apocalypse is a catastrophe; the world crumbles and lies in ruins for a while.

The photographer’s duty in this world is therefore clear: it is to reflect on the truth of it and to persist in the emancipatory and egalitarian openness to the world. Once the world is closed, or shut, it is too late and it is all over.

All that is left in such a moment is to learn from the account of the witnessing ruins and to change. Robert offers us with his photographs an opportunity to actually act and do so.

Dušan Rutar

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Giorgio Esposito These images were created from a custom made pinhole camera. My exposures last for as long as I keep rolling the film, hence the motion blur and the different amount of colours that have been created.

These images are physical, unlike digital images which are non-existent, just digitally stored, where as these images are stored on colour negatives. The best comparison of this would be digitally stored music, against vinyl.

The significance of these pinhole images is not the subject itself but the process around creating the images and the colours that have been produced from this. The fact that the subject matter isn’t evident, aids the viewer to try and find their own interpretations within the image.

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