From the 21st to the 23rd of September 2018, artists from the London Alternative Photography Collective will be exhibiting at the Unseen Amsterdam CO-OP in Amsterdam. The exhibiting artists will be Melanie King, Almudena Romero, Diego Valente, Hannah Fletcher, Simone Mudde, Ramona Guntert, Dafna Talmor and Oliver Raymond-Barker. The theme drawing together works from each artist is a certain strangeness which is encountered in the natural world, with some artists using natural materials to create photographic prints.
To promote the accessibility of alternative and analogue photographic processes, artists Dafna Talmor and Oliver Raymond Barker will create hands-on workshops throughout the duration of the fair. Diego Valente will create a performance especially for Unseen.
Almudena Romero
Almudena Romero will show a series of chlorophyll prints, which uses this organic printing process and found archive images to reflect on the archive as a medium for identity construction, but also a mean to produce artwork, and on the environmental impact of deregulation of goods and capitals. By bleaching the chlorophyll pigments of a leaf, Almudena creates image objects that reflect on the increasing restrictions of movement for persons and the reduction of regulatory barriers for goods and capitals. The artist will be presenting prints that are originally from Asia, Mexico and the Caribbean Islands and still widely available on a daily basis markets in London.
Diego Valente
Diego Valente will be exhibiting a new series of prints of plants photographed at night, using a unique solarisation process which brings out the metallic properties of the silver. This series of prints will also be accompanied by a unique performance.
Ramona Guntert
Ramona will be presenting works that challenge the medium of photography and its existence as prints. Ramona creates spaces with images, shapes and abstraction, collaging, layering, different materials. These collages will expand through the booth creating a dialogue between the artist and the audience. Taking fragments from nature and connecting them in new ways, building a language that the artist calls her own taxidermy. Ramona gets inspired everyday by graffiti, wall textures and patterns in nature. These organic shapes inform her practice. How things overgrow or disappear and how this shapes the walls of the city and its architecture. She uses different materials, to create a feeling (ideas of becoming, transforming, subject object relation) without revealing what we are looking at.
Hannah Fletcher
Hannah will explore the relationship between the photographic surface and organic matter. The work is a flow between processes and materials, between research and exploration, between the poetic and political. Entwining organic matter into the photographic medium, working with uprooted plants, she will apply photographic and non-photographic chemicals directly to exposed black and white silver gelatin paper. She will then incorporate an uprooted and water starved plant to the print as it develops and dries. The resulting images will contain the marks of absorption or osmosis; the uptake by plant roots. The discarded salts on the paper will crystallise as the water is absorbed by the plant or evaporates. Where the roots have been in contact with the paper, salt crystallisation will map out their structure
Simone Mudde
Simone Mudde’s latest work in progress takes colour separation photography as its subject matter. Three monochrome images are exposed using coloured filters and subsequently layered in the darkroom (or via digital editing) to constitute a colour image. Developed in the early 20th century as a means for making colour images, the process was traditionally followed with a meticulous attention to detail. In order for an accurate colour image to be produced, the three separations demanded perfect composition and accurate exposure. Any failure to do so could result in alignment issues as well as glitches of colour. In the case of Mudde, failure is taken as a narrative and basis for the work to be built on. Errors are used to identify the passing of time, the latency of movement, and furthermore to break down the colours that are perceived within the images.
Melanie King
Melanie will exhibit a new 16mm film, which draws attention to an oft forgotten element of our landscape, the Moon - an illuminated lantern which seems to make a journey through through the sky. Caught up in the busy tumult of life, we forget that Earth too is moving, spinning on its axis at 1040 miles per hour.
Dafna Talmor, Constructed Landscapes – Constructed Worlds Workshop
In this hands-on slide collaging workshop, participants are provided with an archive of 35mm found vintage slides and are invited to appropriate images by making physical interventions. Tampering with the materiality of the surface by collaging, drawing, scratching or layering fragments of the reconfigured transparencies, participants will re-project the slides and photograph them digitally.
Participants will get to keep their one-off collaged slides, prints as well as digital files of the projected images they produce. In dialogue with historical as well as contemporary processes that engage with the materiality of film - from Pictorialism, Modernism and current photographic practice - the workshop presents the opportunity to combine analogue and digital processes, experiment with different materials and enables participants to produce work in a short space of time that reflects the medium’s malleability and versatility in a playful way. As well as running a workshop, Dafna will be showing work that has not been exhibited previously.
Oliver Raymond-Barker, The Latent Image Workshop
In this alchemical workshop visitors will discover the latent potential of the photographic image. Working with the Chemigram process they will use pre-exposed black & white paper combined with photographic chemicals to create unique prints. Unlike conventional photographic techniques, Chemigrams are made under normal lighting conditions making it an accessible activity. Using a range of simple masking techniques - such as electrical tape and sticky back plastic - will allow participants to explore the dynamic between geometric form and the unpredictable, organic results generated by the Chemigram process. The technique combines elements of painting and printmaking as well as photography, thereby initiating dialogue around the nature of the photographic medium and it’s relationship to other art forms.
Oliver will also be exhibiting chemigrams within the exhibition.
Why are we asking for your money?
This opportunity is completely unfunded. We are looking to raise money for each of our travel costs, accommodation, fixtures and fittings for the exhibition booth, materials for Oliver and Dafna's workshops, production costs and a per diem for each artist.
The London Alternative Photography Collective is currently self funded and is in receipt of no public funding for this venture.
Put simply, the more money we are able to raise from this crowdfunder page, the better our exhibition can be at Unseen.
Rewards We hope to raise funds through the sale of prints & postcards from each artist.
Individual Signed and Editioned Postcard Print from your chosen artist, £10
Individual postcards are an Edition of 5
Image samples per artist as follows:
Dafna Talmor, Single postcard, from the Constructed Landscapes series, 2018 (5 copies available):
Melanie King, Single postcard, The Moon at UCLO Observatory, 2017 (5 copies available):
Diego Valente, Single postcard (5 copies available):
Hannah Fletcher, Single postcard, from What Remains: The Root and the Radical series, 2018 (5 copies available):
Oliver Raymond-Barker, Single postcard, from the Forest Obscura series, 2017 (5 copies available):
Ramona Guntert, Single postcard (5 copies available):
Simone Mudde, Single postcard, Untitled (Smoke), 2018 (5 copies available):
Almudena Romero, Single postcard, 2018 (5 copies available):
Postcard Prints. Pack of 8 - including an example from each artist (as pictured individually above) - £40
Sets are an edition of 30, and are signed.
Hannah Fletcher £25
Root Cyanotype 148 x 210 mm
Edition of 10
Hannah Fletcher £150
From the series Circles: A Record of Our Time
Hand printed unique C-Print, 8" x 10", Edition of 1
Almudena Romero £90
Personalised chlorophyll print portrait with your image.
Unique chlorophyll print. About 4x6" (102 x 152mm).
Dafna Talmor £150
Untitled (CF-1818181818-1) from the Constructed Landscapes series, 2018
C-type handprint made from five negatives, 10” x 8”
Edition of 10 (5 copies available)
Dafna Talmor Limited Edition Print £50
Untitled (VE-080808080808-1) from the Constructed Landscapes series
C-type handprint made from 6 collaged negatives, 2017
Edition of 100, 7” x 5” (one copy available)
(The limited edition print comes with a free Constructed Landscapes publication - details below)
Dafna Talmor, Constructed Landscapes Publication, £10
Commissioned texts by Sarah Butler, Miranda Gavin, Shoair Mavlian, Gemma Padley and Olga Smith. Self-published in an edition of 200, each with a bespoke bookmark made from test prints from the Constructed Landscapes series. 24 pages printed on Munken Pure paper 120 gsm, Softcover Curious Matter Black Truffle 270 gsm with Constructed Landscapes perspex scan translucent wraparound dust-jacket 7” x 5”, Design by Loose Joints, First Edition, London 2017 (produced on the occasion of Constructed Landscapes solo show at Photofusion, London)
(two copies available)
Dafna Talmor, Constructed Landscapes Bookmark
One-off bookmarks made from test prints from the Constructed Landscapes series, comes with a blank ‘greeting’ card for personalised message
One bookmark £5 (10 units available), pair of bookmarks £9 (20 pairs available), set of five bookmarks £15 (10 sets available)
Oliver Raymond Barker, Forest Obscura I, 10 x 12 inch inkjet print, £150
(One print available from edition of 7)
Oliver Raymond Barker, Forest Obscura II, 10 x 12 inch inkjet print, £150
(One print available from edition of 7)
Oliver Raymond Barker, Forest Obscura III, 10 x 12 inch inkjet print, £150
(One print available from edition of 7)
Melanie King, Photopolymer Photogravure of Saturn, 8x10. £150. Edition of 10. (Results will vary to picture shown)
Melanie King, Cyanotype of the Moon, 8x10, Edition of 10, £50
Ramona Guntert, Hand Printed Collage, £150, 15x20cm
Diego Valente, Silver Gelatin Print on Fibre Based Paper, £150
Simone Mudde, Unique C-Print, 11x14inch £200
Simone Mudde £75
Chromogenic print assembled out of Black and White negatives
Special edition of 10 prints, 30x36cm
Botany and Cameraless Photography Workshop
Half Day £200
Botany and cameraless photography workshop for a group of up to 10 people. This unique workshop will teach individuals about intertwining botanical specimens with cameraless photographic processes.
Image Credit: Corinne Silva, Chelsea Flower Fringe, LAPC cyanotype demonstration.