↓ SALT / SI Gault Millau

Snow

Snow, is project I have been following for several years now. I try to create the illusion of glaciers, snowy landscapes, strange and abstract worlds. Do you see the snow? Great, isn’t it? But in all my photographs of this project snow or ice does not appear even once. I made experiments with different materials. For example: flour, powdered sugar, textiles, ashes and burnt objects. In the images you can see here, material is from a burnt aluminum beer can, which was in the fire for several hours. The circle is therefore closing when I am using a plant containing aluminum to tone these series.
I used a Sinar P3 Phase One Back with 65 million pixels resolution—a Swiss made specialized high-resolution view camera—to photograph a small section of about three to four centimeters from this burned can. Millimeter by millimeter in the macro range, I took these pictures and stacked them. One image consists on average of about 60 to 80 single shots, which are later added together with a special software.
I decided to expose my cyanotypes with a bonsai lamp with 25Watt, which made me independent of the daylight. At the beginning I exposed for a few minutes, but the result was disappointing. I gradually increased exposure time by hours, which made the results more satisfying, but still not as I had imagined. Several tests, many hours and several days later, I finally achieved a breakthrough. The plan was to expose the image for eight hours, but as chance would have it, I fell asleep reading a book and accidentally exposed the print for eleven hours. This was the perfect amount of time for this weak bonsai lamp, which means I underestimated the exposure time excessively. For this project I exposed almost one and a half months, day after day.
The exciting thing about exposing with this small, round bonsai lamp is the effects you can create. If you are very close to the image, a negative vignetting occurs; if you are far away however, the exposure time increases immeasurably. But you can also move the lamp deliberately, for example from the center of the picture to a corner away from the actual subject in the image, this increases the effect of gradients. Additionally, you can expose certain areas of the image more than others.