It is no coincidence that the inventors of photography were well-versed in scientific research and chemistry was substantial for the improvement of photographic techniques. Until the digital age at the turn of the 21st century, film-based photochemical methods remained indispensable for photographic practices – same goes for cinema. Exploring the notion of photogenic, the January 2021 issue looks at the complex relationship between science, photography and the medium of film onscreen.
- Özge Calafato
A collaboration between a photographer, a poet, an animator and an electronic music producer. Linnea Rundgren is a unique photographer, who uses an electron microscope to take viewers into hitherto unseen realms of life – past, present and future. Over the past several years she has accumulate
AgX is an art-science project about material memory and forgetting; it features time-lapse photography of photographic negatives being chemically destroyed.
A multitude of animals brought together in a rhythmical sequence of photographs. The images blend together similar to the cross breeding of animals. An accumulation of bygone days, captured in photos, in which the animals are replaceable, but the same employees frequently reappear. Years of studies
Deforest is an art/science project that combines environmental critique with material enquiry. In this project, sulphuric acid – a highly corrosive acid that burns to the touch – is used to dissolve photographs of old growth rainforest from subtropical Queensland. Deforestation is one of
In May 2010, after record rainfall, flash flood broke embankments of the Vistula near Wilków. Catastrophic flooding deprived thousands of people of all their possessions and roofs over their heads. A few weeks later Zbigniew Czapla found a box of old photographs in his family house also ravag
In 1977 NASA sent a Golden Record into space. It encapsulated the greatest achievements of humanity and included photographs of its species. One of these photos is of Larry, he hopes this will propel him to the status of Earth Ambassador. This is Larry's intergalactic story of life and love.
Composting helps the Earth to grow, it helps life to grow. This docu-animation film explores, via 3 month of photos taken once every two hours, how the passing of time turns a dying world into a new one, a current one, and a fertile one.
A film about "the end" . The end has already started, and ended. We call it "the end" in order to perceive it and make it "visible" , but it had already passed when we called it "the end" , or "the end" is always penetrating the present, so we can not recognize time of the end. The end has already s
Microsculpture is a unique visual experience. The beautifully lit, high magnification portraiture of Levon Biss captures the microscopic form of insects in striking high-resolution detail. The film shows Levon Biss and his pioneering photographic technique as he captures beautifully lit high magnifi
Growing a multispecies image of our body-subject. Hybridities: Almost Other seeks to present revealing "biometric auto portraits" evoking both our human face and our invisible evolutionary counterpart, our microbiota, in order to re-evaluate what being human really means.
Phosphenes blend 2D digital animation and photo-animation to explore the processes of developing thoughts and the understanding of birth, life, and death in the natural world.
Chronogram is a photomontage that explores stillness, motion, and memory. Using a 35mm still camera, multiple exposures were composed and edited in-camera, creating frameless sequences of images printed on 35mm filmstrips. When projected, these images become a non-linear, non-synchronized collage. T
On 1972 the astronaut Charles Duke landed on the Moon on the Apollo XVI. He was in charge of taking photos of the lunar surface with a high-resolution camera. 'The Sasha' is a film about the human perspective on Earth and our constant struggle with our temporal and spatial limitations. From the expl
The mother of the filmmaker tells about how her life has gone when she first came to live in a poorly maintained canal house in Amsterdam fifty years ago. The rapid career of the father; the dramatic separation; her four children she raised alone; she tries to remember the whole story. But she doesn
At the centre are takes which do not change – a tree in a field in Vermont, U.S.A. Since the film was shot over a period of fifty days, the single frame shots create a storm of picturesHans Scheugl. "Tree again became one of Kren´s most beautiful works - although it is difficult to singl
Have you ever wondered how pictures are made? Obscura looks inside our camera to the creatures within, living lives defined by what they see through the lens. But what comes into focus when things change? The arrival of new camera components reveals the world is not as it seems. Are the photographs
April 23: seen from a forestry road, a raven takes flight from a stand of pines. Behind it, in the middle of the woods, lies the carcass of a freshly killed deer. Obviously the work of coyotes whose songs can be heard at night. Surveillance cameras are set up awaiting their return. In the meantime,
Kodak hired my father straight out of college in 1976 to work in their film processing labs. One year prior, a Kodak employee had invented the first digital camera. In 2012 Kodak went bankrupt, and today operates at a fraction of its former scale. Over the course of my father's 30+ year career with
How many neurons do you need to recognize your mother? "A Sentimental Science" explores the limitations of our understanding of how our experience is encoded in neural activity. ISFF13 Symbiosis
The End of Photography' is an elegy to film-based photography and especially to the darkroom. I made it at a time when it was becoming clear that digital photography was going to replace film photography both for the general public and for fine art photographers.
Commissioned to make a short film "about photography" Cornish and Braun take an experimental, filmic examination of various forms of photography from the past 150 years, including a Daguerreotype, tintypes, wet collodion plates, glass negatives, 35mm slide film, polaroids and even a Maholy-Nagy phot
In commemoration of its 75th and final year, a documentary look at the first color film and the last lab in the world to process it.
In a veritable firework display of digital selfport-raits, hundreds of quaint, embarrassing and dread-fully disturbing selfies were arranged in a unique short film composition. Single photos, artistically reworked, consolidate to form a ghastly grin that outshines the abyss of human existence.
Dana Plays' classic experimental film Grain Graphics with beat poet Michael McClure his poetry on the sound track. This is the new re-released film was remastered from 16mm to 2K. Grain Graphics won First Prize at the Poetry Film Festival, run by Poet Herman Berlandt in San Francisco.) It was aired
Photograph seems like a " mirror with memory". Yet what happens if herself never coincides with her image... 'Forget Me Not" is a short story about a puppet-like girl, Leyla Çiftçıkmaz who is obsessed with taking photographs of herself and an old-wise antique shop owner, Koper Kırıkkan
Nijuman No Borei (200 000 Phantoms) questions our relationship to History by assembling archival images and photographs of Hiroshima and the dome of Genbaku, the editing of which creating a sort of memorial ballad in the heart of the city from 1944 to 2006.
Ghost Children presents seven reminiscences of early childhood, read in seven different voices, as the camera presses close against the faded dye and exaggerated grain of family photographs from the early 1980s. Whose faces and memories are those? The film encourages the audience to interrogate assu
In this extraordinary short animation, Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren painted colours, shapes, and transformations directly on to their filmstrip. The result is a vivid interpretation, in fluid lines and colour, of jazz music played by the Oscar Peterson Trio.
In this film, On the Spot series host Fred Davis sets out to learn about the art of photography. Amateur, commercial, news and portrait photographers discuss the tricks of their trade when Davis pays them a visit: Louis Jacques does a photo story on pianist Oscar Peterson, while Ottawa's Yousuf Kars
This documentary short is a portrait of Canadian photographer William Notman. Photography was still in its infancy when he opened his first studio in Montreal in the late 1850s. He rapidly turned his art, and a budding technology, into a highly successful business. Within 5 years he was appointed Ph
This documentary, by filmmaker Carol Geddes, is a unique portrait of George Johnston, a photographer who was himself a creator of portraits and a keeper of his culture. Johnston cared deeply about the traditions of the Tlingit people, and he recorded a critical period in the history of the Tlingit n
Shot entirely in 16mm black-and-white film using single-frame photography, "165708" employs in-camera techniques and chemical manipulation of processed film to produce an eidetic study of temporal elasticity. Techniques include flicker, time-lapse, light painting, stop motion, tinting, and toning. C
Kaleidoscope explores depression in an otherwise vibrant life. It is an original film poem edited to 16mm hand-processed B&W film that has been manipulated through tinting, toning and other cameraless techniques to reflect the fluctuations of living with a mood disorder. Footage collected during the
8 stereoscopic slides taken to the jk-104 optical printer, shot frame by frame, by hand. This is the first hand processed color film I've made. The slides were found at a thrift store in Milwaukee, WI in 2009. They are of Cuba between 1948 and 1950 taken by an army officer while accompanied by his f
An experiment in solarization filmed at the Independent Imaging Retreat in Mount Forest, Canada.
"Five... four... three... two... one," chants an older man into the microphone. He replaces the obligatory unspoken "zero" of the countdown with a dynamic backward twist of his upper body. The point of his finger, which twists backward with him, provokes a change in the shot to reveal the view of a
Meant to promote L'abominable in La Courneuve/ Paris - an independent lab where filmmakers can process, print, digitize etc. their works, now in danger of losing its premises. An anonymous visitor makes a generous donation. Maybe the film can inspire others to give. Or at least introduce them to the
From 4.- 8. March 2019 filmmakers Esther Urlus and Josephine Ahnelt set out to create handmade vegan black and white 16mm negative film material. Replacing the Gelatin in the film emulsion with PVA (Polyvinyl Alcohol) wanting to prove the point that a vegan alternative for analogue film material is
The Lovers is the second part of a small trilogy, dealing with the extinction of memories. In the first part, The Bathers , the two protagonists were subject to the chemical decomposition of the film material. The Lovers , on the other hand, transforms an old Super8 porn film into both a tragic love
An exhilarating dance of spots of color and traces of wear and decomposition. The abstract earth-colored texture is reminiscent of Stan Brakhage´s work. But wait: A live image shimmers from the background. A woman, dressed in bathing suit and cap, swims laps nonchalantly. The easy-listening mu
When filmmakers use existing footage as a raw material for their work and subject it to, for example, physical and chemical processes, the original material's narrative remnants resist deformation and abstraction, thereby producing a new subtext. This is the case with Johannes Hammel's three-part Jo
The materiality of reversal-film material is being portrayed. This analogue technology, with its exposed chemical skeleton is clashing in an anachronistic filmic gag with contemporary digital animation. Colour is presented not as a natural, but a highly constructed medium in the expierence of film.
From a "simple" camera pan through a journey into a ghostly realm, to a veritable trip: Phantom Ride Phantom carries out these three steps with cinematographic verve and great technical finesse. At the same time, the starting point for this phantom of a cinematic ghost ride is a single freeze frame,
Siegfried A. Fruhauf´s Exterior Extended is a prime example of an artistic strategy whereby a maximum effect is achieved through the combination of a minimum of individual elements. A 35mm film with thirty–six photos on it suffices as starting material for a stringent study on the theme
With extraordinary verve, Siegfried A. Fruhauf has made a name for himself in contemporary Austrian filmmaking in only a few short years. Fruhauf not only carries on the fertile tradition of avant-garde filmmakers from Upper Austria (Kubelka, Export, Weibel and Brehm, to name a few), he has also suc
Medial triptych through time as stunning journey of discovery: a photographic landscape scenario starts to become animated to the rhythm of crickets´ chirping; hops back and forth and over the course of the work runs through mutations that originate, on the one hand, in the filmic medium, and
The title of this miniature heralds a series of tensions for which Siegfried A. Fruhauf has found a new form: Still Dissolution measures the relationship between photography and film, standstill and motion, formation and dissolution, now and then, and material reality and illusion, and does so in an
Producing a film includes the essential process of creating copies. Duplication is built into the medium itself and moreover, it constitutes an elaborate and decisive phase in the creative realization of a film. The footage of HEAVY EYES (Schwere Augen) evolved over the course of many copy generatio
The camera with a sun shade is mounted on a heavy tripod in front of a window. Over 21 consecutive days the view outside is filmed from this perspective. The same three rolls of film (totalling 90 m) are used one after the other each day while the mask in front of the camera lens is changed every da
Sasha Pirker´s conceptual experiment Closed Circuit, 2013 is a meeting of two analog formats – Polaroid and 16mm film – as well as of the predetermined units of time and the aesthetic aspects inherent in each material. In this work, the development time of Polaroid images correlate
An affectionate portrait of ninety-year-old Indian photographer G. M. Ahuja, who still lives in the once popular photographic studio in downtown Yangon that his father opened almost a century ago.
An oversea phone call, a supposition and a totally wrong assumption, leads in this animation film to the inevitable. But what is there to expect, words are totally personal, and therefore actually not suitable for communication. So welcome to the age of email, mobile phones, internet, chat and game-
Images photographed among sites of family heritage in the Czech Republic are layered and manipulated through digital processes in a visual meditation on thresholds of past and present.
What starts out as a straight forward documentary on carrier pigeons turns into a subtle investigation of France's reaction to terror, the migrant crisis, and lost traditions. This short hand-made film, entirely processed in red wine, surveys the area surrounding the Calais 'jungle' and allows the u
A love story with a twist based on fin-de-siècle postcards. Film dedicated to anonymous or forgotten artists whose work inspired the Surrealists.
I'm particularly interested in the memory carried by old postcard. Most of these postcards were bought in some souvenir shop in a resort somewhere. I guess that people who appear on those old postcards do not notice they are being photographed. And one cannot guess where, how and when the postcard w
Life as a theatre of its own. A film inspired by the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge (1830 -1904), the pioneer and the inventor of zoopraxiscope - a device for projecting motion pictures.
Documentary about the Minas Gerais photographer Assis Horta, who immortalized the architectural heritage and society of Diamantina. The great impulse of his career came in 1943, with the Consolidation of Labor Laws, promulgated by Getúlio Vargas.
Afghanistan is one of the last places on earth where photographers used a simple type of instant camera called the kamra-e-faoree for means of making a living. The hand-made wooden camera is both camera and darkroom in one and generations of Afghans have had their portraits taken with it, usually fo
City of Photos explores the little known ethos of neighborhood photo studios in Indian cities, discovering entire imaginary worlds in the smallest of spaces. Tiny, shabby studios that appear to be stuck in a time warp turn out to be places throbbing with energy. As full of surprises as the people wh
Hanasaari A is an experimental documentary about the demise of the old coal power plant of Hanasaari island and the irreversible change in the cityscape of Helsinki, Finland. The film is based on half a million photographs from the last two years of the power plant's life.