George Roast - ‘Little Jacket for a Man’
“For the past three years or so, my practice has become increasingly minimal. With each new idea or project I seem to remove a component or process in order to find a simpler expression. My exploration of cameraless techniques has helped to facilitate this, first removing the camera, then removing the negative, then removing the enlarger, and then the light, reducing it to a process which is at its base, just an exploration of a photographic effect.”
My current work ‘Little Jacket for a Man’ concerns the image generation capabilities of expired darkroom paper, with as little interference from myself as I can allow. This in many ways is the logical conclusion of my key interest in photography which falls upon a curiosity to understand 'how'' something is made rather than why it is made or what it depicts. Much like taking apart a mechanical object to see how each component operates, I separate the elements of darkroom process to see how each one works independently.
Naturally, it is unavoidable that the method raises questions regarding photography as a material process, as well as drawing attention to the physicality of photographic paper. It can also open up a dialogue regarding the history of photographic practice, not only due to the fact that the papers themselves are historical photographic objects, antiques of a past photographic age, but also further back than that, the first photographic images were indeed made without a camera.
The images themselves exist as a culmination of several years’ investigation into techniques of cameraless photography. Over this period I have experimented with many techniques including photograms, luminograms, chemigrams, cyanotypes and chemical paintings. With each different process I have sought to simplify the elements to the fewest necessary that will still produce an image, and to find a pure expression of photography, or rather to discover the purity of photography expressing itself.
