Solargraphy

After experimenting with solargraphy on and off over the course of 15 years, I’ve found myself applying my post-processing workflow in a novel way. “Within the Blast Radius” was inspired to a large degree by 1950’s and 60’s footage of nuclear explosions. And in editing, I fully leaned into that.

Probably fueled by the fact that the “Doomsday Clock” (yes that’s a real thing), is closer to midnight than it’s ever been. And that includes the height of the tension surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis during the Cold War.

Aesthetically, I kind of discovered these looked like detonations of weapons of mass destruction by accident. While color grading scans of nine 6-month exposures on Ilford Multigrade RC photographic paper inside a couple of beer cans wrapped with black tape and tied to trees dotted around a park in the western Netherlands, I went “huh, that’s interesting. Let’s make a series out of that”.