Ellen’s Hand & Talbot’s Curve
Light’s immateriality challenges its makers today, analog versus digital, double our challenges. All my projects begin with questions. Here I ask: “What is a 21st century photograph?” sees my answer in partnering 19th century photogram with 20th century Polaroid’s instant technology.
A door opens: “What if I use other processes too?”.
At the dawn of photography, one finds the photogram. The word ‘photography’ means “drawing with light”, its Greek roots – phōs for light, graphis for drawing. Originally, the photo-object was named ‘photogenic drawing’ or ‘sun pictures’ – later – ‘photogram’.
Ellen, my Catholic birth name, in: Irish, Celtic and Gaelic, means “light” or “bringer of light”, a prescient gift from my parents, as my DNA intertwines around fate and destiny as a “light traveller” and “camera operator” an early term for photographers.
“Struck by Light” (1988 – 2025) names my photogram practice: all unique, all black/white and color; color so light sensitive I work in a totally black “light-tight” darkroom, light only upon exposure.
Here sight is replaced with touch, a performative dance in the “black box” records my imagination as I see the line of Talbot’s curve, I fold the paper.
Talbot also photographed a hand while his mathematical equation – Talbot’s curve – adds context and content to this color photogram project with its historical reference in photogram throughout photography’s practitioners.
As a conceptual point-of-departure, I employ the parlour game of Dada and Surrealist movements – exquisite corpse – starting in the pitch black dark, with nothing. Then I fold the color paper, imaging Talbot’s curve. Re-purposing this game towards new paths of creativity in the subconscious; I hide-and-seek; hiding in the dark, seeking an image.
“Ellen’s Hand & Talbot’s Curve” acts as a “linked ring” from Talbot’s photograms and by extension, the intersection of art and technology, science and mathematics, light and its many colors underscored in my palette sees as photographic colour theory in RGBYMC.
My hand, references the “self” or that of the artist’s hand with its links to that history of image makers – cave paintings to the present – “framing” the “hand” collectively in photography while taking note of the invisible labour of this medium.
“Ellen’s Hand & Talbot’s Curve” links my photographic experiments in color with process, minimalism and abstraction, light in all its variety, often with zero exposure, linking my twin practices in Polaroid 20 X 24 under “Photography Degree Zero” (1996-2024) and in Photogram as “Struck by Light” (1988 – 2025).
“Ellen’s Hand & Talbot’s Curve” references the dawn of photography and those pioneers, all “light travelers” forming a ”linked ring” that adds new picture “signs” to our global picture culture.
“See What Develops…!” Is a Polaroid phrase that describes this new series, and by extension, celebrates all processes from the 19th century to the present in a series of 21st century photo-objects titled: “Ellen’s Hand & Talbot ’s Curve”
