Description: Harlow Tighe, an American contemporary artist working in Milan, Italy, creates unique sunprinted kallitype photograms of animals, plants and the human figure. With these traces, her cameraless photography continues the experiments of Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins and the surrealist tradition of Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy, exploring the unconscious and imaginary shadow realms.
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Shadowlands - Untitled
I find that photograms resonate with an ethereal, otherworldly beauty, yet are grounded in a rich, tangible immediacy. My photograms capture the restless shadows and intimate traces of insects, birds, animals, plants, symbolic objects, and most often the human body. They seem to bridge realities, hovering between visible and invisible worlds, where time stops, tonal values flip, shadows glow and creatures radiate light.
Like the mark left by a sweating glass of water, photograms are unique traces. Sweat, blood, body heat and other residues interact in unexpected ways with photosensitive chemicals, enhancing the intimate and sensual nature of photograms. They suggest a playful oscillation between the ephemeral and material, absence and presence, past and present. The object creates the shadow, but now the shadow creates the object.