Alice Cazenave Interview and Photographs
Ruth Connolly recently spoke to photographer Alice Cazenave about her practice and alternative photography.
My photographic practice is currently centred around experimentation with camera-less techniques and historical processes such as the photogram. Although I love traditional darkroom photography, I feel that the photo-saturated culture in which we are situated has brought about a sense of familiarity and apathy towards photography as an art form. I am pushing myself to merge and revise existing divergent techniques, to develop new alternative processes in photography. In my work I explore processes which deflect from conventional photographic practice and through this I aim to push the perception of what photography can be. I am enamoured with the process of making photographs by hand; for me photography is something to be made, not taken, and to be looked at, not looked through.
Before embarking on my MA in Art and Science at Central Saint Martins, I studied Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Bristol. The discipline learnt from laboratory work in my previous studies has informed my photographic practice and kept me afloat when experimenting with organic materials which are unpredictable in nature.
I have recently created a series of portraits using the photosensitive surface of leaves to create an image. Through the manipulation of the leaves’ natural photo-synthetic processes, I was able to create a photographic image which lays latent inside the leaf, and is drawn to the surface through chemical submersion. In these works, the technology of photography is aligned with the leaves’ natural process of using light for creation. They are artworks inspired by a romantic view of nature,and function to observe the magic of nature with Darwinian exactitude and honesty.
The portraits are ephemeral; they emerge slowly upon submersion in solution, and gradually fade away again. I am fond of this element of secrecy, since it recalls the intimacy of long days spent
hoping to succeed in the formation of the image. Since the leaf has multiple chloroplasts existing in individual, separated cells, the resolution of the photograph produced is remarkably high. The chloroplasts are comparable to the grain in an analogue print, or pixel in a digital photograph.
The development of this technique tested by patience and perseverance. I developed an unhealthy commitment to the leaves, elevating successful experiments to a sacred standing. The leaves became precious, I found myself preserving wilting leaves in wet cloths, stored in lunch boxes, and the situation became both absurd and critical at the same time. This sense of madness that can arise during a project became the inspiration for a series of photographs that I took of an imagined artist-recluse working obsessively in an attic space. I am interested in the state of compulsion and delirium that can be entered when becoming immersed in a project, and the perception of the subject as crazed or unhinged, due to their fixation with the work.
During the development of this photographic process I began extracting chlorophyll from leaves to produce a translucent, pigment-less surface for the starch image to be draw out from. Extending the practice of camera-less photography, I have created a series of photograms from the leaf skeletons which exhibit the leaves’ network of veins and cellular matter. The charm of camera-less photography lies in its ability to unmask the hidden, where instead of an external referent seen through a lens, life itself becomes the image.
Biography
As a graduate in Cellular and Molecular Medicine from the University of Bristol, my previous areas of study include cancer biology, genetics and biochemistry. I have since embarked on an MA in Art & Science at Central Saint Martins, London, where I work primarily in darkroom photography.
In my current photographic practice I am experimenting with camera-less techniques and historical processes such as the photogram. I am pushing myself to merge and revise existing divergent techniques, to develop new alternative processes in photography. In my work I explore processes which deviate from conventional photographic practice and through this I aim to push the perception of what photography can be.
I am enamoured with the process of making photographs by hand – I work closely with liquid photo emulsion and have developed a technique to create photographs out of leaves. The discipline learnt from laboratory work in my previous studies has informed my photographic practice, and kept me afloat when experimenting with organic materials which are unpredictable in nature. For me photography is something to be made, not taken, and to be looked at, not looked through.
