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Over the last decade, Claudia Smigrod has immersed herself in a series of darkroom projects that bring new currency to the cameraless technique of the photogram. Through her process, she transforms organic natural forms and inorganic manmade objects into mesmerizing, luminous images that seemingly radiate light from within. With her inventive experiments that hover in the liminal space between abstraction and representation, Smigrod's photograms defy easy categorization.
By turns captivating and confounding, the photograms that comprise Paper Light explore the inherent ambiguity of photography and the twofold ability of light to both conceal and reveal. They also challenge the viewer to see objects in new ways. Brought together, the cumulative impact of Smigrod's photograms is otherworldly, like a new kind of glittering constellation in which the critical subject becomes both the image produced and the medium of photography itself.
Although each discrete project in Paper Light has its own raison d'etre, there is a cohesion to Smigrod's enterprise. Evident in the entire body of work is the photographer's unique vision: she sees things not as they are but what they can become. In translating various materials into photograms, she thinks about their opacity or translucency, considering any appropriately sized object as simply a transmitter or reflector of light. With process and metaphor as their shared underlying central concerns, these works exemplify the renaissance of the photogram at the hands of the twenty-first century's antiquarian avant-garde.
Claudia Smigrod, Professor Emeritus, Corcoran College of the Arts & Design, lives and works in Alexandria, Virginia. |