Glass Ruminations

(August 2019, with the MIT Museum Studio)

Glass ruminates within itself; I created photo prints that put glass’s thoughts to paper.

Film photography is all about chemicals that react to light. It’s the fundamental principle behind how light entering a camera can create an image imprinted on a strip of film. A black-and-white picture on film is the result of chemicals that turned black where light came through the camera and collided with it. The end product is a negative image left on the plastic, which is the inverse of the original scene — the highlights are black, and the shadows are clear.

Photographic paper, used for making prints from negatives, is the same process. When you make a print from your negative, you generally put it in a device called an enlarger, which projects light through the film and focuses the projection onto photo paper, which turns black where the light shines on it. You end up with the positive of your image, with the highlights and shadows intact.

I set out to use this magical paper to capture more than just perfectly focused images made from negatives.

My friend Gabe Fields is a glassblower who creates sculptures by heating sheets of glass until they collapse into crumpled balls. I used these pieces as lenses to play with light; shining light through the glass projects beautiful organic patterns created by the internal reflections in the pieces’ twists and turns.

I used resin-coated photo paper to “catch” the light patterns, by projecting the patterns using a point source of light and a converging lens. The paper, of course, turns black where light falls upon it.

What I created is essentially a camera: the light source is the scene, the sculpture is the lens, and the photo paper is the sensor.