What we call Lo-Fi photography is defined as a collection of photographic techniques that require little in the way of elaborate technology and that concentrate on home-made cameras, found materials, and kitchen chemistry. Accessibility is emphasized; the processes should be inexpensive, require only a modest space, and pose little risk to the environment or the photographer’s health and safety. The techniques should lend themselves to experimentation, and they should be capable of subtlety, variation, and further elaboration. A connection is drawn between the physical nature of the Lo-Fi photographic processes and the physicality of the resulting photograph. Examples by six contemporary photographic artists are discussed in light of these concerns.
1.1 What is Lo-Fi Photography?
There are streams in contemporary art photography that flow into and out of each other, sometimes joining to form rivers and wetlands, but just as often going their separate ways. The particular artistic watershed of primary concern for this book can be seen as a set of values or aesthetics that many individual artists adhere to, or at least aspire to, but often with quite different individual emphases and sometimes strong disagreement about details. It is very much an international community of artists, learning from each other through art produced and considered, exhibitions curated and attended, books written and read, workshops given and taken, and—increasingly—through social media. There is no single, agreed-upon name that captures the entirety of this loose “movement” in photography, but some common adjectives are: alternative-process, experimental, new-antiquarian, historical-process, analog, sustainable-process, and of course, Lo-Fi, the term I use in this book as an admittedly vague catch-all. For three important examples of efforts to make sense of this, see Anderson (2023), Rexer (2002), and Palomar (2022).
The word process comes up a lot, and indeed it is a common trait among Lo-Fi photographers to have a strong process orientation. It is, of course, the art that matters in the end, but it is not only that. How the photograph was made informs how one sees it, and since means have a way of affecting ends, the process inevitably becomes part of the product. It matters when the artist’s hand had a direct role in the photograph’s surface. When someone constructs their own camera and uses their mind’s eye to imagine what it might see as they build it, a different kind of connection is made between art and artist.
There is some irony in the fact that many historical photographic processes from the mid-nineteenth century are now more accessible than ever and practiced by an ever-widening array of photographers. This is partly a reaction to the perfect uniformity and predictability of digital photography, but there are other reasons as well. Easy digital image capture—with a scanner or even the click of a cell phone—allows one to use many of these historical processes in entirely new ways that were impossible in their heyday. For example, it is possible with a long exposure to capture an image in a simple camera by using the historical printing process of cyanotype. If one uses only processes from that same time period, however, there is no good way to make a positive image from the blue-tone negative that results.† Now the negative can be easily captured with a scanner or digital camera and inverted digitally to a positive. An unexpectedly intriguing type of image results, leading to an entirely new way to think of this process from some of the earliest days of photography. This surprising combination of the old and new is one of the themes of Lo-Fi Photography.
As only one of many possible ways to think about these currents in contemporary art photography, the photographic processes outlined in Lo-Fi Photography have been chosen to emphasize the following:
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Low-Fi: We value techniques that require little in the way of elaborate technology.
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Do-it-Yourself (DIY): We concentrate, wherever possible, on home-made cameras, found materials, and kitchen chemistry.
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Accessibility: The equipment required is inexpensive, and the processes can be carried out in a small space, without significant risk of harm to the environment or to the artist’s health and safety. While the techniques are artistically versatile and can be taken to a high level, basic and interesting results can be achieved without advanced training. Something can be done even if only rather small snatches of found time are available.
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Experimentation: We emphasize basic processes that are not set in stone, but that instead invite themselves to be combined with other processes and re-invented in a myriad of ways.
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Depth: A process should be capable of subtlety, variation, and further invention. It should be useful for making art, not just pictures.
There are no processes described in Lo-Fi Photography that fully combine all of these points at once; there are always trade-offs. Pinhole photography (Chapter 16), for example, is at its most accessible when combined with digital scanning and printing—a decidedly hi-fi addition. Anthotype (Chapter 8) is arguably the most Lo-Fi of photographic processes, but it has rather severe limitations; an anthotype is impermanent, lasting for decades only if kept in the dark and unseen. Furthermore, the best anthotypes are most-often produced with the aid of digitally printed transparencies. Clearly, the practical may be at odds with the pure, and so I have taken a pragmatic approach in Lo-Fi Photography regarding the choices of techniques and materials.
1.2 Print/Capture; Positive/Negative
The exploration of Lo-Fi photographic processes sometimes leads to difficult artistic choices. Many of these issues go back to the 19th century beginnings of photography, but new technology has added some unexpected twists. Digital technology in particular has enabled new variations on old techniques. I pose as a question the first of these concerns, one that each of us must answer whenever we make a picture. Which is more important? Is it the very fact that rays of light coming from the world—perhaps during only a “snapshot” in time—were captured in order to make an image? Or is it instead the fact that there is a flat surface with evocative marks on it—an object one can hold in one’s hands and look at? Is one more concerned with the image and its capture or instead with some photographic “thing?”
There are photochemical processes that allow one to hang upon the wall the very material that captured the image inside the camera. This is called a direct positive, and the concept has an obvious appeal. Practical direct-positive camera processes, however, are the exception not the rule. First, many photochemical processes are of a sensitivity that is too low to be of practical use to record the faint image in a camera. This is especially true for most of the Lo-Fi photographic techniques surveyed in this book. Of equal importance, however, is the fact that most photochemical processes naturally produce a negative, rather than a positive. For a negative image, bright forms in the world are directly rendered as dark, and vice versa. If one desires an ordinary interpretation of light and dark forms in the world, a negative process is off on the wrong foot—at least if a direct line from camera to gallery wall is desired.
One can sometimes get around the very-low (or even extremely low) sensitivity of a Lo-Fi process by redefining the goals. Instead of capturing a brief moment in time, for example, one can allow for a prolonged exposure of the light-sensitive material to the faint in-camera image. Several possibilities of such an in-camera slow photography are examined in Part III.
The image formed inside a camera is nearly always quite faint. If, however, photography is broadly interpreted as “writing with light”, then perhaps one can dispense with the camera altogether. It is possible for such camera-less photography to take advantage of the illumination of even full sunlight directly upon the photographic material. The image is then formed not by the optics of lenses, but by selectively blocking some of the light with objects or a transparent material that contains a picture. The low sensitivity of the process is, for this type of photography, only a minor inconvenience. It may in fact be an advantage; several examples are described in Part II of Lo-Fi Photography.
1.3 Physical Process and Physicality
Although Lo-Fi Photography includes a few techniques of my own sort-of invention‡ and, so far as I know, described here for the first time, most of the processes included are old indeed. Cyanotype, for example, the subject of Chapter 9, has been well described in countless other books, with several good ones in print at the time of writing (Anderson, 2019; Golaz, 2022, for example). I do, however, have my own, perhaps-quirky take on these traditional subjects.
As I describe in more detail in Beaver (2022, ch. 44–46), I am drawn to photographic processes that emphasize the physical interaction between light and the light-sensitive material, and in this I am far from alone. Commercial photography, especially in its digital culmination, does whatever it can to hide that interaction in order to make a “perfect” image. The processes described in this book, on the other hand, are imperfect, and they introduce their own elements into the picture at the level of the light-sensitive material itself. A cyanotype print, for example, betrays—emphasizes even—the fact that someone’s hand used a brush to apply the liquid sensitizer to a nice piece of watercolor paper.
Commercial photography strives for the permanent, even the archival. Some of the processes in Lo-Fi Photography, on the other hand, are ephemeral; they fade or darken with the passage of time or upon exposure to light as they are viewed. The impermanence of the ephemeral photograph further emphasizes its physicality—that it is an object subject to the laws of nature—and there is a poetry in that (Palomar, 2022).
There can be benefits in allowing the physical process itself to be a collaborator in the art. The subtitle of this book is “Art from Do-It-Yourself Chemistry and Physics” for a reason. From the point of view of Lo-Fi photography, a deeper understanding of the physical and chemical nature of the photographic process can serve to bring one closer to one’s own art. Furthermore, the physics and chemistry of photography is important in its own right; it illustrates some interesting things about the way the universe works.
As demonstrated by the historical vignette described in Chapter 4, this connection was well understood by one of photography’s most important early innovators, John Herschel. His papers from the early 1840s, famous for their photographic discoveries, are every bit as much about physics and chemistry. In these papers Herschel uses the newly discovered photographic materials not only for the making of pictures, but also as tools in experiments aimed instead at a better understanding of the very nature of light and matter. As further described in Chapter 4, these dual intentions are understood and taken to heart in the experiments and writings of Mary Somerville, one of the leading “big picture” thinkers of the day.
There is quite a bit of practical knowledge from a “how-to” perspective in the chapters that follow. Because of its dual focus, however, the author was not above using some of this as an excuse to talk about bigger things. In Chapter 16, for example, I walk the reader through four different ways to measure the size of a tiny pinhole. There is a practical side to this; it is needed for pinhole photography and, depending upon one’s circumstance, one method might prove more accessible than another. Truth be told, however, the biggest reason for including so much about so little is that it leads to several “teaching moments” about the nature of light and optics, and I find that irresistible.
Perhaps because I have always been a nature boy at heart, the direct connection drawn by the physical and chemical properties of these Lo-Fi processes inspires me to embrace their imperfections—and I read similar motivations into the work of many contemporary photographic artists. Section 1.4 showcases some examples.
1.4 Six Examples
I here explore, by way of example, some of the reasons that many contemporary artists are increasingly turning to Lo-Fi and DIY photographic processes as tools for the making of their art. I have chosen these six artists because I admire their work, and their practice illustrates many of the ideas in this book. Several other examples can be found in Beaver (2018, section 11.2) and Beaver (2022, ch. 45).
Figure 1.1, a reproduction of a print made by the Swiss photographic artist Annette Golaz, is a good example of how different processes can be brought together as creative tools. The original image was captured with a digital camera, but she replaced the camera’s lens with a pinhole; we consider photochemical versions of so-called pinhole photography in some detail in Chapter 16.
Tri-color new resinotype print. Courtesy of Annette Golaz.
Golaz used this digital color picture to make three separate black and white images, one each for the primary colors cyan, magenta, and yellow, and printed them onto transparency film with an inkjet printer. The transparencies were then used to make three separate exposures onto a very physical medium—the new resinotype process described in Chapter 10. The surface luster of this color picture on stiff board, made from UV-curing resin and hand-ground colored pastels, has a strong physicality that cannot be fully captured in a reproduction.
Originally from Istanbul, Gül Cevikoglu lives and works in New York. She often uses camera-less photographic techniques to capture the art inherent in natural processes, sometimes at a tiny, almost microscopic scale. Many of the techniques she uses—lasergrams, watergrams, crystalograms, and chemigrams, for example—challenge the very definition of photography.
Figure 1.2 shows a reproduction of one of her chemi-lumen prints. This complex and highly interactive way of making a picture is outside the scope of this book, but it has connections to the lumen and accelerated-lumen processes of Chapter 11.§
Chemi-lumen print. Courtesy of Gül Cevikoglu.
Cevikoglu has this to say about this particular piece: “Some people think it is a jellyfish, others say fireworks. Having been in China many years ago, I was influenced by visiting the Summer Palace in Beijing. Only one woman has ever sat on China’s throne as Empress in her own right. That woman was Wu Zetian of the Tang dynasty, and this piece represents her.”
Andrey Piletsky’s work often uses silver gelatin print paper, intended for making prints directly from film negatives in the darkroom. Using this paper in the Lo-Fi manner of the lumen process (Chapter 11), however, he sometimes exposes it in an unconventional way. Figure 1.3 shows two examples; they were exposed by direct contact to the screen of a cellphone. They are then rendered fairly permanent with ordinary table salt, rather than the usual archival treatment of a chemical fixer.¶ These small-format prints are engaging as photographic objects. Their intimate connection to a decidedly virtual technology only adds to their mystery.
Two lumen prints exposed by direct contact with the screen of a mobile phone. Courtesy of Andrey Piletsky.
Two lumen prints exposed by direct contact with the screen of a mobile phone. Courtesy of Andrey Piletsky.
Born in Kyiv, Andrey has lived much of his life in Tel Aviv; he now lives and works in London. There is an elegant simplicity to much of his work. Pictures like the two in Figure 1.3, for example, are made with nothing more than out-of-date photographic paper, the mobile phone that is always at hand, water, and table salt. No darkroom or special facilities are needed, only a dim space with a sink. The size and shape of the print recalls the ubiquitous object from which it was exposed. Seen in isolation, such a photograph is almost casual, the sort of thing that might make for an impulsive gift to a new friend.‖ But these are but small parts of a body of work that together tells a bigger story.
Margaret Zydek often uses a combination of ordinary pinhole photography (Chapter 16) and solargraphy (Chapter 17) to make her evocative photographs. There is no simpler way to capture an image with a camera than solargraphy. The price is an exposure that lasts days or even months, thus blurring time in a way unlike any other photographic process. Figure 1.4 shows one of her recent examples, a four-day-long exposure.
Solargraph. Courtesy of Margaret Zydek.
A solargraph cannot be composed in the manner of an ordinary picture. The daily track of the Sun due to Earth’s rotation and the changing of the seasons is the most obvious mark, and it is only visible over the passage of time. The snapshot-in-time view from the camera when the photographer mounts it in place is always quite different. Zydek’s photograph in Figure 1.4 shows her adept skill at composing with her imagination.
Sarah Darke is a Somerset, UK based photographic artist who works extensively with the lumen process. Darke’s lumen prints are photograms (Chapter 6), essentially direct shadow prints of real objects. Going against the usual practice, however, Darke leaves her lumen prints unfixed and thus impermanent. She stores them away in the dark to preserve them, but before she does, she scans them to make a permanent digital record. As we shall explore in detail in Chapters 11 and 15, the black and white paper, when exposed in this way and left unfixed, may show an intense range of colors through the scattering of light. Darke often alters the effect by applying salt, lemon juice, or other materials to the paper before or during the exposure, making her lumen prints a bit like what is sometimes called “chemilumen”, which combines elements of both the lumen process and chemigram. We explore some of the chemistry of such alterations in Chapter 11.
Figure 1.5 shows two of Sarah’s lumen images. The lack of fixing, combined with her often days-long exposures, yields a high contrast. The digital step of scanning the physical print allows for further adjustments in overall hue, saturation, and contrast. It is one of the themes of this book to explore this kind of interplay between the virtual nature of the digital image and Lo-Fi processes that have a rather emphatic physical presence.
Two digital images from scanned lumen prints. Courtesy of Sarah Darke.
In recent years, social media has had an enormous impact on the practice of Lo-Fi photography. The dominant photographic processes of the past 100 years have developed standardized practices, with materials, techniques, and tools that have been carefully engineered by commercial interests. The techniques presented in this book, on the other hand, are imperfect, experimental, and produce results that are often unplanned.
Much of the knowledge of these techniques is transmitted directly from person to person, and social media has made this far easier. It is now very much a world-wide community of artists, and not a week goes by that some new innovation arises seemingly by magic. The New Zealand based photographer Jo Bind first learned about the innovative tri-color cyanotypes of Annette Golaz (Chapter 9, Section 9.7) from Facebook, and I in turn learned of Bind’s photography through Annette. Figure 1.6 shows one of his prints—in this case a bi-color cyanotype print on watercolor paper, made from what was originally a digital image. It is striking how effectively he uses the limited color palette of this technique to artistic advantage.
Bi-color cyanotype. Courtesy of Jo Bind.
Websites
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Annette Golaz
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Gül Cevikoglu
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Andrey Piletsky
https://www.instagram.com/andrey.pil.art/, https://www.andreypil.com
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Margaret Zydek
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Sarah Darke
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Jo Bind
But see Chapter 14, Section 14.8.
There is nothing new under the Sun, and any seemingly new “invention” inevitably includes ingredients from many others.
For more information on chemi-lumen and the closely related chemigram, see Beaver (2022, section 35.6) and Anderson (2023, ch. 5).
We shall use this salt stabilization technique in Chapters 11 and 16.
I was fortunate enough to have met and worked with Andrey at the Experimental Photography Festival in Barcelona, in July of 2022. It is thus unsurprising that I have one of these under a magnet on the door of the mini-refrigerator in my basement workroom.
