I’m delighted to announce the publication of Playing With Light / Jeu de Lumière, a 50-page bilingual book of lumen prints by Hélène Barrette and me.
“Maybe we should challenge each other to make lumens??”
“A lumen-challenge sounds like a great idea.”
So began a collaboration across a continent and an international border.
Hélène Barrette and I first met in 2009, drawn together by our shared love of blurry, black-and-white film photographs, often made through a plastic lens or a pinhole.
A lumen print is a form of (usually) cameraless photography in which the artist places objects on top of a sheet of unexposed black and white silver gelatin photographic paper (or film) and exposes it to sunlight. No developer is used, and the results are preserved using scanning because the image is fugitive without fixing. Hélène and I had both made lumen prints before our collaboration began.
We can trace the beginnings of this book to an email conversation in June 2022, which I’ve quoted above. For over a year, we both made lumen prints, showing each other our images and discussing our experiences with the process. As this process continued, it occurred to me that we could make a book of the images. To my delight, Hélène, agreed. Today, that book is a reality.
Playing With Light / Jeu de Lumière is available from MagCloud.