Born 1956 in Czech Republic. Lives and works in Paris.
Dubai Transmutations
With this photographic series, Martin Becka questions the meaning of the organisation of our present and about our aspirations for the future. […] Dubai, […] cliché of modernity, opulence and success, is projected here in another space-time. Becka shows us the city as though we were looking back at it from a distant future and creates a kind of ‘archaeology of the present’. The Dubai Transmutations series, realised by Martin Becka in 2008, was taken with a 40×50 cm view camera on wax paper negative. This process, invented in 1851 by Gustave Le Gray, is ill-adapted to temperatures as high as those of Dubai, imposes a way of working radically different from what gelatin silver photography or current digital procedures require. Becka had to sensitise the paper a few hours before taking the picture. Once the exposure was made, the negatives had to be developed on the same evening. The positives were made when the photographer returned to Paris, on salted paper lightly washed with albumin, that gave a slight gold effect.
Jean Pierre Quignaux.
