The Magic of Light & Nature

Conchita Fernandes speaks to Almudena Romero about her evocative imagery that looks at the social and economic inequalities that exist as a result of colonialism.

- Conchita Fernandes

THE CRAFT OF PHOTOGRAPHY WITHOUT A CAMERA

For centuries, scientists and inventors have theorised over the different ways in which one could paint with light to render the world as they perceive it. But it was only in 1825, when the French inventor, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, created the first photograph with a process called heliography. With the camera obscura, he preserved the scene onto a pewter plate, thinly coated with a naturally occurring asphalt. This opened up a world of possibilities for other ways of picture-making in the subsequent years—calotypes, cyanotypes, the wet-plate collodion process, photograms, chemigrams and others. Cumbersome as they were to produce, the photographs made as a result of these processes harboured very specific qualities that were unique to them.

As technology progressed, the time it took to make a picture shortened. With the introduction of film rolls, and much later, digital photography, these processes became obsolete. However, the 21st century has witnessed a renewed interest in alternative and “camera-less” or unconventional ways of picture-making. Perhaps it points to our need to slow down in a world that is rapidly on the move.

In this issue of Better Photography, Conchita Fernandes and Nilofer Khan speak to four artists—Almudena Romero, Granville Carroll, Ricardo Guixà, and Johanna Rotko—who employ unconventional techniques to picture-making to convey complex themes of identity, race, migration, ecology, colonisation, and our relationship with the universe.