Fun Prints (Part II): Photochemistry

As a follow up to yesterday’s post about fun prints inspired by pinball backglasses, let’s look today at a different idea for prints taken from a recently released book.

The volume in question, Films (Mack Books) by British photographer Paul Graham, looks at the author’s passion for developing and printing images.

Most books about the traditional Vs digital photography debate feature lengthy essays about the merits of one medium compared to the other.

Graham’s Films is not an essay about this debate, but it can be considered as a sort of reflection about the physicality behind films.

While for younger generations Kodacolor or Fujicolor are almost unintelligible names, films – among the main materials that helped many of us expressing themselves and their creativity in the last century – turned in the last few years into precious relics from a distant past saved by artists and aficionados who keep in their fridges spare rolls ready to be used for very special projects.

Photographic films are the result of an almost alchemical scientific process: a sheet of plastic coated with a gelatin emulsion containing light-sensitive silver halide salts that exposed to light forms images.

Graham looked at the component of grain that forms the images and, scanning blank film ends or unexposed frames from his body of work, he tried to get a different perspective on photography.

All the images collected in the volume superficially look like large colour fields, cloud-like abstract dots, blobs or colour forms, but are in reality close-ups of the granular form of the films’ structure.

While these images are a tribute to film and to its physicality and a way to say farewell to this medium, I think they would also be a perfect starting point for prints to be used in fashion collections.

Their colours and shades are indeed rather fascinating and also represent the clashing point between science, alchemy and creativity.

If you want to know more about Paul Graham’s work, check out his retrospective exhibition that looks back on 25 years of his photographs at London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery (until 19th June).