Research
The Grain Project
The research behind the work. An ongoing laboratory for the photographic image.
The Grain Project is where the language is built. Not a series, but the research underneath every series. It begins with a single conviction: a photograph is made of matter. Silver, light, chemistry, time. Most images are made to hide this. Mine are built on it.
Method
The darkroom as laboratory
I trained as a research engineer, and the method stayed. In the darkroom I change one variable at a time. Exposure, dilution, temperature, the second flash of light that turns a tone against itself. I keep what holds. I write down what fails. Three years of this have produced a way of working, not a set of tricks.
Inversion
Solarisation and the Mackie line
Solarisation interested me because it disobeys. Flood a print with light in the middle of development and the tones begin to reverse. A bright line rises along the edges of things, drawn by the process itself. It has a name, the Mackie line, the closest photography comes to drawing on its own. I spent years learning to make it mine.
Structure
Grain as structure
Grain does the same work at a smaller scale. It breaks the surface into particles and lets the eye rebuild the image from them. A body becomes a texture. The texture becomes a body again. That oscillation, between figure and matter, is the subject as much as anyone standing in front of the camera.
The print
The print completes it
Everything resolves on paper. On a pearl surface the grain catches real light. Deep blacks hold the image down. The highlights stay veiled. Each print is made by hand, by contact, one sheet at a time. The paper enters the chemistry blank and leaves as an object. That passage is the work.
The Grain Project is the research. Mackie Lines is the first work it produced.
See Mackie LinesThe research also traces back to the earlier street series, Human Trajectories.