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126 30 August 2004

Nimbus

I always loved those silver prints by Le Gray of the troops of Napoleon II exercising at Châlons, wild men - gorillars in the mist, an easy subject in some respects given that the formal composition is almost "given" by the ordered soldiers but it is Le Grays' minimal tonal range and the use of the massive elements of grey sky and dark earth which make these works definitive landscapes.

The connection to craft - the artists in Collodion struggled to get more from their negatives frequently (and almopst invisibly) employing combinations of negatives when printing. This was usually to balance the unequal response of their collodion emulsion to the sky and the land, to effectively record both required separate exposures to be made which were then printed in combination.

Are my landscape montages really any different? The continuity of practice with the nineteenth century is closer than we think; I notice the phrase "a painter with light" appearing, to describe artists using layered stacks of sequential camera images, where on a computer individual layers can be brushed or erased at will, to reveal the layers underneath. For example a series of twenty four images recorded at the passing of each hour through day to night, when layered in a stack, any hour can be revealed at will, so finally we can null the passage of the sun.