Photo of the Week: Reality from “Channeled” Negatives
For his senior art portfolio, artist Pascal Raymond recycles deteriorated negatives of car wrecks to create a diptych evoking a spiritual and economic reality.
The artist is using 4 x 5 inch negatives of 1960s automobile accidents originally photographed by the Lane Brothers Commercial photography studio. Raymond back lit, digitally re-photographed, and closely cropped the negatives. He prefers some of the older acetate negatives because their corrosion correlates to the automobile’s damage, and the degradation or “channeling” allows them be viewed in new and unexpected ways. Raymond views the light-catching surface as a spiritual life-giving force.
Raymond’s art is intended to evoke the hopelessness and despair of Dorothea Lange‘s Depression-era portraits and is a metaphor of the current condition of the automobile industry and the wider economy.
Pascal Raymond is enrolled in the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design at Georgia State University.
In Dorothea Lange: a Life Beyond Limits Linda Gordon describes how Lange captured the Depression in photographs.
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