Experimenters

Littoral Drift (a term that describes the movement of sand and sediment along the shoreline by wind) is a series of camera-less photographic prints that Meghann Riepenhoff creates by exposing light-sensitive photographic paper to bodies of water. She made this print by submerging hand-prepared sheets of cyanotype paper into ocean waves off the Pacific coast. The resulting prints depict the movement of water on the paper. Riepenhoff acts as a collaborator with nature in creating these and describes her style as “chaos with a dash of control.” Over time, the photographs will deteriorate due to the unstable process of creating the prints, which Riepenhoff sees as a fitting metaphor for the passage of time.

Leah Jaynes Karp created this mixed-media series in response to the Atlanta Child Murders. Between 1979 and 1981, at least twenty-nine Black children, teens, and young adults—mostly boys—were kidnapped and murdered; a suspect was identified and apprehended in 1981. In Karp’s hauntingly delicate works, she pulls phrases and words from news articles covering the events and interweaves them with cutout photographs of lilies. The overall effect of the work is a poignant commemoration of the tragedy of many young lives senselessly lost.

Paula Chamlee’s work stretches beyond the realm of straight photography and into assemblage, painting, and drawing. This collage was inspired by photocopies of prints that her husband, the late photographer Michael A. Smith, intended to share with a prospective collector. Because the photographs’ dimensions did not match with that of the copy machine, the images required cropping and taping. Intrigued by the nature of these cast-off bits piled together and the relationship of the parts to the whole, Chamlee created this collage by piecing together images of her body that Smith had taken.

Since the 1980s, conceptual artist Annette Lemieux has appropriated, altered, and recombined found images and objects to create new and unexpected meanings. In this work, Lemieux altered and rephotographed a nineteenth-century tintype that appears to show a man shaking his own hand. Made with a special camera and using double exposure, trick photographs like these were very popular from the 1860s onward, with one advertising slogan proclaiming, “Every Man His Own Twin!” Lemieux’s alterations to the image inject a spookier note, making it seem like the man is confronting his own ghost.

The prints in Svjetlana Tepavcevic’s Means of Reproduction series are camera-less photographs created by placing seed pods on a flatbed scanner. Fascinated by the infinitely varied and intricate structures that the most basic forms of life take, Tepavcevic enlarges the scans so that the pods are all the same size and scale and seem to float in front of a hazy field of color. Drawing on new imaging technologies, Tepavcevic says she aims “to bring the concept of portraiture to the still-life genre.”

In Christina Price Washington’s series Light in Purse, a piece of photographic paper becomes a visual logbook of her movements and a day’s activities. By placing the light-sensitive paper inside the bag, each instance of her opening her bag is automatically recorded as outside light filters in and strikes the paper, which results in the monochromatic forms once the print is developed in the darkroom. The paper in the bag also naturally becomes bent and folded as the day goes on, adding a weathered texture that complements the abstract forms of the exposed surface.

Barbara Kasten is best known for constructing and photographing complex assemblages from a wide variety of materials, including painted wood, plaster, mirrors, screens, and fibers. In 1986, she began photographing postmodern architecture, including the High’s Richard Meier–designed building, pictured here. Using a large-format camera and working with a professional movie lighting crew, Kasten created an elaborate setup of colored lights and mirrors that transformed the building’s gleaming white, cool industrial forms into a vibrant, dynamic, and dizzying intersection of forms and space.