PhotoChemical Book Series B (UNIQUE COPY)

Catalina De la Cruz
PhotoChemical Book Series B (UNIQUE COPY)

Photographs: Catalina De la Cruz

Publisher: Self published

32 pages

Year: 2024

Comments: Illustrated hardcover, 25 x 17,5 cm. Photochemical book - unique manufactured copy -, made in Gum Bichromated. 19th century photographic emulsion that incorporates color pigments. The images that articulate it are chemical photographs made in sum of layers, which correspond to artificial and / or organic textures.

B.-1 is part of an artistic project of appropriation of the American territory. Through images of different spaces, brought into dialogue within a series of photochemical artist’s books, it articulates visual relationships to propose an idea of landscape as a mobile and relational construct, irreducible to a single meaning. The exhibition experiments, points, surrounds, observes, explores, and infers from elements found within a landscape-experience. In order to construct new imaginaries, it crosses the social, cultural, and visual dimensions of the territory with the light, reference, and materiality of the photographic image, and its transposition into the artist’s book.

The material production of this work has been carried out in gum bichromate, a 19th-century photochemical technique that incorporates color pigments into its photosensitive solution. It is a production system that allows for the material manipulation of the image in its tone, thickness, density, and saturation.

This Photochemical Artist’s Book is conceived as an approach through the deserts of Chile and Peru. These are extreme spaces of resistance, where structures, traces, nature, and cultures survive, and which address chromatic, graphic, architectural, spatial, and referential issues of the landscape.