These will all be exhibited once lockdown has eased in Melbourne. I also have women participate from current times, who give me plants to create prints from. I research stories from records written in early times of white settlement, locate the sites where I take a plant, and I create lumens using these. I am currently in the last stages of my MA and have been using lumen prints to document the history of sexual abuse in Australia. I played with several alternative processes and in my Honours year I started experimenting with paper negatives and large format pinholes, which became my final thesis work. Serious health issues forced a sudden change and I decided that I wanted to expand the way I thought about my photography by enrolling into a Degree in Creative Arts majoring in photography.
Working as a professional photographer, I did not have much spare time for experimentation. We’ve also included a short introduction to our work, and a process photo showing how the print was made. But within the constraints of this simple process, as you will see from the prints below, there is room for a remarkable range of creative and artistic expression.įor the Lockdown Lumen project, each of us created a handmade lumen print using objects and light found in or around the home. The process is experimental, tactile and above all simple, requiring only photographic paper (expired or fogged photographic paper will also do) and optionally fixer. The results are unpredictable – the look and colour of the final image depends on the type of paper used, exposure time, temperature, humidity, cloud cover and many other factors, which makes each print unique. Lumens have a unique, delicate, almost luminous quality. Other variations on the basic process include using a drawing or negative instead of an object, coating the paper with cyanotype fluid to make blue-tinted cyanolumens, using a UV lamp instead of sunlight, or subsequently toning, bleaching or colourising the print. This can result in some colour-shift or fading, so some artists prefer not to fix, instead viewing prints only under safelight – or simply embracing their transient nature. The image can be fixed, using conventional darkroom fixer, for greater permanence. In its simplest form, lumen involves placing objects on photosensitive paper (like what we use for darkroom printing) and exposing it to sunlight for a few hours to create an image (here is a more detailed guide, if you’re interested).
Photograms have a long history, and illustrious practitioners including Anna Atkins, Man Ray and Pablo Picasso. The term “lumen” was popularised by Jerry Burchfield, but it is essentially a type of photogram – a camera-less photographic image, made by placing objects directly on a photosensitive substrate. Lockdown Lumen focuses on one such alternative process – lumen prints. Descriptions and instructions for all the processes mentioned above, and many more, are available on, which, incidentally, spawned the aforementioned Facebook group. Alternative processes range from virtually costless kitchen-counter methods (anthotypes made with beetroot juice, albumen prints made with egg-whites) to deluxe materials (glass plates coated with platinum or gold) from relatively common processes (cyanotype, mainstream by alt proc standards) to rare and esoteric ones (Mordançage) from historic (daguerreotype, invented in the 1830s) to modern (Polaroid lifts and inkjet transfers). It includes a vast range of processes, but what they have in common is that they are all photographic, that is, they involve “drawing with light”. Alt proc is an umbrella term with no universally-agreed definition. The Lockdown Lumen project was conceived on a Facebook group for alternative photographic processes (alt proc, for short).
2 Anjella Roessler (Geelong, Australia).