From Assignment on Surrealism in Photography (see handout on Surrealism Project page)
What I discovered I could do in the darkroom, only recently really, despite spending a year in
it, was like discovering a whole new realm of possibilities. The darkroom is the art.
Fixer and developer are paints and light is your paintbrush. While often these fixer and
developer experiments are unpredictable and may end in a multitude of ways, they are
no more unpredictable than a Jackson Pollock. Sure like him, you plan a general design
for your work, but who knows how your paint, fixer, or developer will fall in the end. The
end design is like film photography itself, a waiting process.
I started experimenting in the darkroom by blocking parts of images with fixer and
then speeding up the development of others by placing developer on the images.
Sometimes I would do this with a negative image projected onto the paper, sometimes I
would coat hands, lips, faces, or natural objects in fixer, all in an attempt to create
something out of the norm, something that might need a few minutes to decipher, or
may never be deciphered. So thus began the birth of “Fixer Painting.”
I originally came up with this process when creating the three-frame palm tree
image located in the "Fixer Painting" area of my portfolio. The middle image has long
white streaks that were created by literally painting fixer onto paper and then printing
onto it. I eventually subtracted the negative and started working only with the fixer and
paper itself. “Shedding Skin” was created by coating parts of my body in fixer from the
top left to the right the body parts are as follows, lips, palm, hand. The bottom row from
left to right is as follows: hand, lips, face. I am currently working on a project based on
phosphenes in which I paint and spray fixer to mimic the retina flashes I've always found
fascinating.
~E.H.
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