Experiments in Analog Photography
by Christopher Phillips
At a moment when smartphone users send more than a billion digital images cloud-ward each day, a growing number of contemporary artists are turning away from screen-based images to explore the photograph’s existence as an insistently material object. Often dispensing with the camera and lens entirely, they employ the bare essentials of paper, chemicals, and light to fashion near-abstract images that have a tantalizing physical presence. Works by seven of these new photo-materialists are currently on view in the Getty Museum’s fascinating exhibition Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography. Each artist has a distinctive and often eccentric mode of operation.
John Chiara, Grandview at Elysian, 2012
Read this article in its entirety over at The New Yorker.
