16mm Experiments
After leaving my role as a curator/archivist at the BFI National Archive, one of the things I missed about the job (apart from my amazing colleagues) was handling analogue film.
I enrolled on some 16mm camera-less filmmaking workshops, the first of which took place at not/nowhere in East London, led by filmmaker James Holcombe. It proved almost like "exit programming" from my 16 years service as a film archivist/curator in a national institution in that, instead of painstakingly handling and preserving film in adherence to a strict set of conservationist codes of practice which had become second nature to me, we were instructed to grab a length of film from a large bin containing a tangled mass of found footage off-cuts and basically go about "wrecking" it.
We were encouraged to paint it, scratch it, stab it, bleach it, and even melt it. I got a bit carried away with the latter method, as the below examples demonstrate. It was all very counterintuitive - but at the same time - strangely cathartic...
For me these experiments, both practically and visually, represent a window into another another world - which I'm still tentatively stepping into...more destruction to come... watch this space...
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Phytogram experiments
I discovered the magical world of phytograms in a workshop led by filmmaker Karel Doing, who actually coined the term 'phytogram', at LUX in north London. It's a beautiful technique in which the internal chemistry of plants is used to create images on the emulsion of photographic paper or film. Incorporating this natural processes in the art of photography was such a revelation in that it brings together three elements that I love: plants, film and photography - and uses fewer nasty chemicals than traditional film/photography processing. What I love about this kind of camera-less filmmaking is the relinquishing of control. You initiate the process but then the process itself takes over. Alchemy steps in, and you just wait to see what happens, making small adjustments here and there.
(I'll be adding some moving-image examples of this process here in the near future)
Before placing the plants that you've collected on the photographic paper or film stock, you have to soak them in a solution of water, soda and vitamin C and allow them to soften. The plants I picked floated around before settling into his lovely arrangement.