In the 18th century Benjamin Franklin conducted extensive research into electricity, selling his possessions to fund his work. In 1752 he is said to have attached a key to a kite and flown it in a thunderstorm, proving – at great danger to himself – that lightning is electrical.
Electricity at the time was perceived as a mysterious force that could kill, revive life, or otherwise bend the laws of nature. Luigi Galvani’s experiments with making dead frogs twitch on application of electricity in 1771 led to reports of electrically revitalised human corpses in the medical literature – ideas that Mary Shelly was familiar with when she wrote Frankenstein in 1818. While she didn’t name the electrocution method in the birth of the monster she described the doctor being witness to electricity’s potential when he saw a tree get struck by lightning, and electrical revitalisation of monsters became stock theme in later film adaptations of Frankenstein and the modern horror genre.
In 1831, Michael Faraday established the basis for the electromagnetic field concept, leading to the invention of electric generators and transformers, dramatically improving the quality of human life forever. Interestingly, Willian Fox Talbot – who was a botanist and the inventor of colotype photography – had collaborated with Faraday on several experiments with static electricity and it is by analogy with electrical terms that he named ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ photographic images.
Fox Talbot’s frustration at being unable to draw had led him to construct a ‘drawing machine’. While on holidays at Lake Como (where, incidentally, Mary Shelly had spent time and set part of Frankenstein) he noticed how the Italian sun burned his skin and he began thinking about how light might be able to mark other surfaces.
He discovered the photosensitive properties of silver nitrate, a substance known to change properties when exposed to light, and he began transferring plant shapes directly onto the surface. Then he began putting the paper into a camera obscura, creating negatives which, unlike the daguerreotype (the Polaroid of its day), allowed for multiple prints of each photograph.
In recent years Hiroshi Sugimoto became fascinated with these early Fox Talbot negatives, embarking on a project to buy as many of them as he could and make his own prints with them, true to the original techniques. Appropriately, this Photogenic Drawing project then led to his experiments with electricity for the Lightning Fields body of work (pictured here), made by applying electric charges directly to film with a 400 000 volt generator. The series marks the artist’s desire to return to the inventions of these 18th and 19th century scientific pioneers, and to retrace the early relationship between discoveries in photography and electricity.
As part of Sugimoto’s ongoing inquiry into the scientific and philosophical implications of the medium of photography, a Lightning Fields installation is planned for the Biennale of Sydney this May. The director David Elliott announced the project at the program launch last week but as yet no further information has been released.
Hiroshi Sugimoto is my absolute favourite, this is such exciting news!!
Comment by Millie — February 23, 2010 @ 12:05 pm