Artist Statement
For 10 years Carol Panaro-Smith and James Hajicek have been working collaboratively using the process of photogenic drawing – one of photography’s earliest and most beautiful. It is also one of the most direct processes that resides at the sacred core of photography. Plants are simply placed in direct contact with hand-coated light sensitive paper and placed under an intense summer sun so that they may they complete their final act of withering and dying as they create a lasting image of themselves.
Process Statement
We work with variations of Fox Talbot’s chemical formulas from the 1830's and discovered that altering the light sensitive solutions, the chemistry in the paper, the intensity and accompanying heat of the light, and the chemicals emerging from the organic material, a color palette and physical presence emerged in the print creating an ‘organic artifact’ beyond the imagination of anything previously thought of as photographic. We have taken great care to produce this work in the most archival method possible without altering its inherent organic essence.
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