This article was taken from the October 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Sorry, Photoshop -- this striking image of a disassembled cube was, in fact, created entirely in-camera by award-winning photographer Jessica Eaton. "I work on the premise that a lot of what I believe is wrong," says Eaton, a 35-year-old who is based in Montreal and who made the picture for her series Cubes For Albers and LeWitt. "I am really after finding images I don't already know."
That meant abandoning controllable digital methods and innovating with analogue techniques instead.
First, Eaton paints an object white, black and different shades of grey. Then she takes her camera and shoots it on a single frame of 4 x 5" large-format film with a red, green or blue filter in front of the lens. The object's shading affects resulting hues; black functions like masking tape, preventing portions of the film from exposing. Next, Eaton reconfigures the set, changes the filter, exposes that same frame again, and repeats as many times as necessary.
So how does she know what changes will work artistically, shot-on-shot? "I draw my image [with a marker pen on the viewfinder] as I make it," she says. "And these are big cameras that have a piece of glass you look through that is the same size as the negative. The glass on my camera has a grid, so that helps to line things up." Even so, between ten and 50 images are discarded for each project. "It's amazing how badly I can expose a piece of film. I intend to start putting out a volume in book form every few years showing some of my failures."
But there are only ever compositional duds: beyond a sense of wonder, Eaton's work -- on show at the Brancolini Grimaldi Gallery in London this month -- doesn't have larger thematic concerns. Photography, she says, is good at showing us how terrible the world can be. "I want to put all of my energy into trying to find it amazing."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
