‘Creation by Destruction’ is a project that I am currently working on in photographic practice.
For this project, we were given the freedom to create anything that we wanted so I researched into things that I was interested in, especially film photography. I stumbled upon the photographer Oliver Blohm. He was keen on Polaroid photography and he used ‘The Impossible Project’ film. ‘The Impossible Project’ was a project that was set up to produce film after Polaroid manufacturers decided to stop making Polaroid film. This film takes up to 30 minutes to fully develop so Blohm wanted to find ways to speed up the process. He did this by using a microwave a pseudo-shield made out of a wet carton and glass. This did speed up the time of developing but came with an interesting side effect. It created beautiful textures to the images and made some of the colours run it also burnt part of the images which gave an ominous feel to it.
After finding Blohm, I wanted to research more into the process of destroying images or film negatives. I then came across photographer Peter Hoffman, who took landscape photographs of a lake in his hometown, then would pour gasoline over them and set them a light. This would create beautiful tones to the images and give them an eerie effect, which I absolutely fell in love with.
I researched into a few more photographers that had done this but it seemed that it wasn’t that popular and was quite difficult to find other people that had tried this, so I thought I would give it a go. I wanted to take strong portraits of people on black and white film then destroy then negative and print the images. One of my favorite image that I destroyed was from a photo shoot I did, where I wrote words on a woman’s body that meant a lot to her, and that had a deep meaning behind them. I then got the negative a buried it in the soil for just over a week, when I dug it up, I couldn’t tell if it had done anything to the negative and I didn’t want to wash away the soil as it might add to the effect. So, I got straight to the dark room to print my image and when it was printed it had added a texture to the image and made it look like I had used a filter to add grain to the image. I fell in love with the image and was looking forward to doing more. Over the next few weeks, I spent all of my time burning, scratching and bleaching my negatives. I even put a negative in a bowl of coca-cola and it made the image fade and blur which I really liked as it made it unusual and interesting.
I have really enjoyed distressing my negatives and I am hoping to continue doing more and finding out new ways to destroy my negatives.
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