PHOTOGRAPHS
Bucklow, Christopher
England (1957 - )
Guest. (A.F.) 25,000 Solar Images, 4:43 pm, 1st September, 1993
1993
Unique silver-dye bleach (Cibachrome) print; Photogram
39 x 29 1/2 in. (99 x 74.9 cm) image size; 39 3/4 x 30 x 1 1/2 in. (101 x 76.2 x 3.8 cm) frame size
Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection, gift of Joseph and Elaine Monsen and The Boeing Company
FA 97.30

Bucklow's series title "Guest" is in reference to the immaterial content of the human body. He considers the physical form of the body to be the container, or "host." The image is made with a large multiple pinhole camera that is 20 inches deep and takes 30 x 40-inch Cibachrome paper. There is no negative, and each print is unique. He uses the sun as his only light source, and in fact each dot of light is an image of the sun. (If there was a partial eclipse during the exposure, each of those images would be crescent-shaped.) The image is of fellow photographer Adam Fuss. -- Label copy for After Art: Rethinking 150 Years of Photography, December 4, 1994 to March 26, 1995.

For his series Guests, Christopher Bucklow outlined the silhouette of a shadow cast on a sheet of aluminum foil by his subject, in this case his friend and fellow photographer, Adam Fuss. He then poked countless pinholes in the foil within that silhouette and placed the foil in front of color photographic paper in a large handmade box that acted as a camera. Placing the box in the sun allowed light to expose the color paper through the pinholes in the foil. What looks like a graphic rendering or special effect, is instead a transcription of light using one of the earliest and most basic of photographic apparatuses, a lens-less box called a pinhole camera. -- Label copy for The Digital Eye: Photographic Art in the Electronic Age, July 9 to September 25, 2011.