What The Sea Saw
What The Sea Saw 2025 lumen photogram, seaweed, promite, seeds
Every morning when I go down the beach, I find new treasures to delight. This week when I returned home from the former gold mining town of Hill End, the tide was coming in leaving behind little gifts of seaweed.
I took some home with me, unrolled my already exposed photogram from Hill End and arranged pieces of seaweed on it, held down onto the paper by small pebbles. I left it all day and night and wondered what it might reveal when I brought it inside to scan on my A4 scanner.
Being a huge sheet of A1 photographic paper, I had to quarter the image into smaller parts, rotating it clockwise to fit the whole image in. When I tried to piece them together only two seemed to fit as a continuous image. I wasn’t that worried though as it was only an experiment.
At first I thought my scanner just wasn’t picking up the image in quite the same way as the large scanner we used during the workshop. The image was very grey with only a few colours revealed. However when I adjusted the contrast, the deep blacks and reds popped out and I was happy with the result.
It did feel a little like ‘cheating’ to use the colour adjustment and yet this is a three part type of image making procedure. I used photographic emulsion coated paper, laid out a design on it, exposed it for maybe 12 hours then initially scanned it at the workshop. The background was still pale. When exposing for the second time with the seaweed, the photogram image became more defined and the paper background much darker.
I’m curious to see what results I might achieve with Liquid Light photographic emulsion spread onto my handmade paper and exposed. For this process you don’t actually ‘fix’ the image or wash out the salts. I’ll try it both ways, fixed and unfixed to see what sort of results I get.
It’s opened up a whole new way of image making. I can’t wait to try environmental exposures; burying parts of the paper in sand and creating a conversation with the sea. Who knows what the sea sees.
Tumultuous 2025 Two images joined together
