Fluorescent Adolescent

(May 2018, final project for EC.310)

I don’t know how to paint, but I adore how paintings show evidence of their process.

When you inspect the details of a painting, you can see and feel each part of its creation — the artist’s steady hands, the instincts behind the color theory, and the way the pigment flowed from the brush and settled into the grain of the canvas.

In this project, I created scans of film photos that show artifacts of their own process. The negatives contain long exposures with light trails, serving as evidence of how the light entered the camera in a dark room. When I developed the negatives and held a strip of film in my hands, I drew on it with highlighters to mark the physical object’s existence. Finally, when scanning the negatives, the inverse of the highlighters’ colors became part of the final product. That is, the blue streaks in these photos were yellow ink on the negatives, the orange resulted from cyan ink, and the green resulted from pink.

Ultimately, I created photos that are more than just representations of the original scene captured by the camera.

Process:
Photos on Ilford HP5 400 film
Colored on the negatives with highlighters, sharpies, and ink on fingers
Scanned the manipulated negatives as color film