HEAVY LIGHT
NELLIE CASTAN GALLERY (VIC) 2003

The Heavy Light Series takes as its subject the camera itself in order to play with some of the procedures and assumptions central to photographic practice.

The work is produced by casting second hand cameras in silicone. Selected casts are used to mould positive forms of the cameras in pigmented embedding resin. These resin positives are then “posed” on photographic paper, manipulated using a range of techniques, and exposed to light under a colour enlarger - the result is a photogram, rephotographed and then printed in a large format. The camera cast itself is thus used as a negative, produced to create an image of itself.

These inversions of photography’s central process specifically play with the popular notion that photography is a simple recording device that somehow objectively represents an external world