One of the artists who truly stood out to me when I first became interested in fine art photography was Man Ray.
His ‘Rayograms’ took the everyday process of printing from a film negative using an enlarger and created something spectacular – simply by removing the 35mm negative and replacing it with with relatively mundane items.
The items were transformed and rendered beautiful and mystical through re-contextualising and capturing their form through light and shade directly onto light sensative paper.
I wanted to explore further what the raw material of light could do on a more abstract level.
This series (As with a number of my abstract collections including Atomic Visions, Perpetual Portal and Crystal Nebula) uses just a light source, an aperture to create the forms and tones – the camera catches the results in much the same way that Man Ray’s photographic paper captured his work.
I call them my SOLAgrams in tribute to such an inspirational artist.