The artist has built her own camera, which sculptures light, using it to photograph Alpine peaks conquered exactly 150 years ago.
2015 saw the 150th anniversary of the first successful attempt to scale the Matterhorn, an achievement by British climbers and their Swiss guides, which resonated widely throughout Europe and was seen as the culmination of the so-called Golden Age of Alpinism. In that period (from 1854 to 1865), a significant change in the cultural perception of mountains took place: from dangerous and barren areas inhabited by supernatural creatures, they turned, in the eyes of both travellers and highlanders, into spaces for enjoying nature’s beauty and majesty.
It was also a time of rapid development in early photographic techniques, such as the collodion process, which allowed photographers to work outside the studio for the first time, despite still needing large-format cameras and the need to develop the materials right after exposure.
Agnieszka Kozłowska’s Carved by Light project focuses on those first Alpine achievements. The artist uses an unexplored photo technique, which because of how time-consuming and physically challenging it is, brings back the work methods of the first mountaineers and early photographers.
Kozłowska chose more than 30 summits in the highest ranges of the Alps (the Mont Blanc Massif, Pennine and Bernese Alps), which were all conquered for the first time during the Golden Age of Alpinism. She photographed each of them with a self-made large-format camera, exposing a 20x25cm polymer plate to light for a period ranging from several hours (in the summer) to several days (in winter).The artist described the process as follows:
When light-sensitive polymer plates… are exposed in-camera, those parts that are affected by light will harden, while shadow sections of the image are washed away in post-processing, forming indentations. The expanse of snow and rock in front of the lens is no longer translated into a two-dimensional set of tonal differences, but rather into a three-dimensional relief, which becomes visible when light illuminates the plate at a certain angle… Each photopolymer plate relief will constitute the final artwork to be encountered by the viewer as an authentic having-been-there object formed by the light reflected off the scene in front of the lens.
This time-consuming, physically challenging and failure-prone method mirrors the achievements, both photographic and in mountaineering, of the first conquerors of the summits. Kozłowska continued:
The process used, however, is not historical – it is an experimental and heretofore, to the best of my knowledge, unexplored technique that produces a relief in a photopolymer plate exposed directly in-camera for several hours. Combining traditional large-format cameras and modern industrial offset printing materials, this method is the next step in my continued investigation of the potential of photographs to signify not only as images, functioning in a sphere of meanings that are exclusively human, but also as physical traces that engage viewer’s embodied and imaginative response.