Sensitive to Light
Essay by Duncan Wooldridge

In direct contact with a photographic negative, we shift our perspectives continuously. Holding this delicate object, we rotate around the room, trying to touch it as little as possible, our fingers at its edges, bending it with a discrete pressure somewhere between holding and squeezing. We move with the object, hoping that an image will appear, drawing out something hidden on this dark and smooth object. We move it up and down, and turn left and then right, until we direct it towards a source of light, placing the negative between ourselves and the light’s source. Until then, the negative is strangely opaque, playfully resistant and reflective. Light bounces off its surface, and the promise of an image toys with our desire. It seems to catch as much of a reflection as it gives away its contents. To look at the photograph is often to look beyond it. Perhaps this is because most images point – this is me, this is that place – as if we had leapt through the image’s window and into its space, as if we were there. Once we see through, we seem to forget that we once saw around.

Joanna Vestey’s Sensitive to Light places us in direct contact with the photographic negative. She presents us with images of the substrate of photography, the concrete matter of the image. To make the project, Vestey collected unused boxes and packets of photographic film – sheets and glass plates, cut into rectangles for studied single exposures, which have sat sealed within their boxes since their manufacture.

They date from the last decade of the 19th century, up to and including the early 1960s and 1990s, the emergence and massification of the computational image. Opening the boxes and photographing the sheets on a lightbox, she re-presents the negatives, focusing upon and identifying transformations and events upon the negative, as emergent traces which draw us back to the histories and conditions of photography as both process and object. We might see these images as the narrative of a potential unfulfilled, but however poetic this may sound, this rapidly replaces the matter of the image with the desire for an image to see straight through.

To capture photography itself – as one of the most significant inventions of modernity – we should pay attention to these images, which seem, on first glance, to show us little or nothing. They have emerged from the seemingly immaterial to become physical. These are images that have not taken place, yet within them, they tell us a lot about the image – about photography, about time, about matter. Vestey’s re-presented negatives provide evidence of the shifting chemical composition of the photograph, which it charts as a field of subtly modulating experiments, originating from common grounds of photo-sensitivity, before diverging into distinct fields and operations – the many different requirements and conditions, and manufacturers, for which photographs are produced. We can note this by returning to the colour of the image, and the rich array of hues that are accentuated by the backlighting of the lightbox as Vestey photographs the negatives. Rich variations of dark, blood-like reds, blues becoming violet, and greens of luxurious depth recur often, but tan and pale greens also feature. These reveal different chemical make-ups, and how, within the production of the negative, we encounter divergence upon divergence. From the variety of conditions for which photographs are required, to the multitude of competing manufacturers, our conception of the photograph is split into smaller and smaller pieces. Sensitive to Light becomes then an informal archive of modes of picturing, and photography’s multiple attempts to render the world, and see it in its complexity. It nods also towards choice – a range of both options and solutions which appear unfathomable today in the jpeg. We might identify and celebrate the heterogeneity of a medium that at times appears to be a singular process, requiring only one object, the negative, to take us towards the image. The photograph is always more than what it carries.

As it outlines an informal archive and maps the field of photographic industry, we should note that Vestey’s project does not limit itself to production. In actuality, its concern is for an expanded time of the image, one which places claims of technological progress in the context of past practices. By collecting examples which span across the first and second centuries of photography, with some in the very recent past, the project opens up a deep sense of time. Siegfried Zielinski has proposed a Deep Time of the Media as the enquiry into past practices that might inform our understanding of the present. Zielinski’s proposition includes an archaeology of forms and devices that can extend to centuries and into millennia: it is especially instructive when we consider that the narrative of endless technological progress appears to be coupled to an equally continuous forgetting. Zielinski states that “[m]edia are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated”, a description which applies equally to the aims of media, and the study of its functions. Vestey is reconnecting us with the matter of the image, and moreover, is fusing the past to the present, as we witness within these images time accumulated. Perhaps this will allow us to access photography’s rarely acknowledged ongoing-ness, and even its relationship to entropy. It permits us, provisionally at least, to encounter its continuity and trace the lifespan of the photographic image beyond its claim to arrest a moment in the past.

We cannot fail to have noticed the emergence of marks and details, pictorial events within these blank images. At the edges, subtle effects are appearing, and vignettes are forming. Their edges are especially receptive to transformation, whilst the film is stacked or grouped together in its container, the edges remaining exposed, and acting as the first contact for changes in temperature and humidity, or agents in the air. In many of Vestey’s selected images there are streaks and spots.

Uneven and graduated tonalities recur. Dramatic impressions appearing to form a phantom image have also taken place, though these are outliers, rarities. Occasionally, Vestey will show multiple sheets from a single box, revealing continuities and discontinues equally. Slow and Vigorous, The Imperial Dry Plate Company, 31/2 x 51/2, 1920s, shows three images from a single box. Their edges are gaining marks, and their colours subtly vary. Each negative, of course, is continuing to pick up information, and is continuing its transformation. Nur im dunkeln öffnen, Perutz Peromnia-S Panchromatische Universal Platte, 31/2 x 43/4, 1930s, shows a diptych, both with vertical bands, suggesting a mechanised application of chemistry that has reacted unevenly to the changes over time. Peppering these images are small marks that we might mistake for fingerprints were the negative not too small. Their unpredictable distribution brings the machine and hand together, and negates our assumptions of industrial perfection. They allude to the surety of August Strindberg’s Celestographs, attempts to capture the night sky onto sheets of chemically prepared paper, placed outside in the grounds of his home. The Celestographs produced compelling images of dreamy starscapes, though their true catalyst was the uneven application of chemistry, which had reacted with its grassy ground surface. We might read the traces in front of us with analytical care. However much we might conceive of the image as fixing time, the photograph continues to receive impressions. Vestey’s unprocessed negatives are not unprocessed at all – simply, continuing to process, continuing to receive and record. The image resists representation and presents us with abstraction. It does so to draw us towards the matter of the image, to recalibrate our perception towards a sense of photography that resists the immediate now or a simple conception of the past. We can enter instead a deep time of the image, from which we can come to know how it escapes that the that has been, to become the that which continues to be.