Ellen
Carey

Crush & Pull & Rollback

"How is this picture made?" and "What is this a picture of?" are questions asked about my work. They address photography as process and the conundrum of an image without a picture 'sign' to read. Light's immateriality challenges its makers today, analog versus digital, doubles our challenges. "What is a 21st century photograph?" finds my answer in partnering 19th century photogram with 20th century Polaroid's instant technology. "What do these two have in common?" and "Where do they overlap?" My answer sees the negative.
Crush & Pull combines Polaroid and photogram using the Polaroid negative to create new abstract forms and blended hues with experimental approaches and innovative process-driven methods located in: chemistry-laden Polaroid pods and the light-tight color darkroom. Here, Polaroid's 20th century instant technology meets the wonder of 19th century photograms.
Crush & Pull links my photographic experiments in color with process, minimalism and abstraction, light and its variations, often with zero exposure, uniting my twin practices Struck by Light and Photography Degree Zero for the first time. Crush & Pull bridges ideas from my own photograms, its history and practitioners to ideas in Polaroid, instant technology's history and those practitioners. My project revisits the negative, rich in -- metaphor, object, picture 'sign' -- that delivers a whole new approach to picture making, underscored in -- concept, context, content -- with a unique, new photographic object that has never been seen or done before.
The history of the 'shadow' in art is cited in photogram, a paper negative (1834) contact printed for its positive (1840). Polaroid 20 X 24 (circa 1980s) makes a large negative transferring it in development to make the positive (www.20X24Studio.com) in a one-step, peel-away process, a large contact print in 60 seconds. This negative-to-positive duality, the foundation in all photography, finds overlapping affinities in both the 19th century photogram and its "negative" counterpart in the 20th Polaroid; within this DNA, creative links are explored through my artists approaches and innovations. In this context, it must be noted, that I am the only Polaroid artist to keep and exhibit the negatives. In current discourse, the negative is often forgotten - hidden - a means to an end, results found in the final document, its 'picture sign' often seen in the portrait, landscape, still life, figure and so forth.
Crush & Pull starts with a Polaroid negative, reversing time-honored photogram methods whereby the image ends as a negative. Polaroid's negative is physically crushed; touching a photographic emulsion's surface is historically taboo, a professional no-no, and doing this, by me, breaks tradition. The negative is now transformed, to be both object and the receiver of light. In a "normal" photogram, an object (leaf/lace) is placed between light and the chemically coated, light-sensitive paper, and is the object's referent. After exposure, a silhouetted image, a ghostly shadow of the object outlined in light sees the negative, later contact printed for its positive.