HUMILITAS
Weathered Images
study
"One comes to know oneself, imaginatively, as part of nature; and nature is understood to have a dignity quite apart from its susceptibility to human control. It is the experience of human nature in that wider setting that sponsors the growth of conscience; and conscience, in turn, owes a responsibility to nature that is at once vivid and hard to specify.
The sense of human life as a participant in nature also teaches humility in the face of
wilful experiments – whether the experiments are pursued for the sake of social improvements or self-expansion"
David Bromwich, "Natural Piety and Human Responsibility"*
Weathered Images is a poetic experiment on image and matter set in and around high altitude quarry sites of the Catalan Pyrenees. The creative principle is to perform three exposures on the photographic material: in-camera celluloid (negative) to light; photographic enlarging to printing light and exposure of the actual print to the outdoors.
I like the idea that an image may emancipate itself from the human (from myself as photographer) through undergoing chemical and material changes. The "damage" effected when left out in the open, unsheltered from rain, wind, light, sedimentation and mineralization processes, transforms an image through a revalorisation of itself.
Driving this study are themes of resistance, fragility, exposure, shelter, care.
"Weathering comprises any chemical or mechanical processes in stones
which are exposed to the weather and experience changes in character and deteriorate.
An alteration is a modification of the material that does not necessarily imply a worsening of it characteristics. The notion of ‘damage’ is grounded in human perception of the loss of value due to decay"
Jörn Wichert, Slate as Dimension Stone*
I am interested in the changes taking place on the skin of the image: mineral layers, earth, vegetation, water, a gust of wind, an insect's expedition across its surface...
The question of a material's porosity. The next step is to experiment with an open printing process, by removing the last stage of printing (application of the fixer), leaving the image exposed, vulnerable, in a precarious state of visibility.
Work in progress.
Weathered Images #1 and 2, Humilitas series, 2023. C-type black & white hand prints from medium format film on heavyweight baryta-coated fibre base paper, 26 x 26 cm, mounted onto disused locally-sourced roofing slate.
Village carpenter Xavier Rodríguez mounting one of the prints in his workshop.
Documented by the artist, 2023.
Top images: digital documentation of mounted photographic prints, each installed in the location depicted in the image: the slate quarry on the way to Burg and the path to Les Bordes, Farrera, Catalan Pyrenees. 2023.
* Bromwich, David. “Natural Piety and Human Responsibility” in Nature and Value, ed. Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University Press, 2020. (pp. 261-276) and Wichert, Jörn. Slate as Dimension Stone: Origins, Standards, Properties, Mining and Deposits, Springer Mineralogy, 2020.
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