This web page was created programmatically, to learn the article in its unique location you may go to the hyperlink bellow:
https://aperture.org/editorial/the-photographer-who-sees-with-her-fingertips/
and if you wish to take away this text from our web site please contact us
Like many analog photographers, Aspen Mays makes photographs in a darkroom. But in contrast to most of them, she doesn’t use a digicam and movie. She creates her photograms in full darkness, with out even the pink glow of the safelight. For hours, she works with eyes unseeing and infrequently closed, guided by muscle reminiscence, contact, and the sound of dripping water.
In the darkish, Mays reaches for objects she organized within the mild. Her fingers discover the taped strains on the desk directing her to supplies. She creases photographic paper, invents celestial patterns with a gap punch, and layers and removes tape to kind sunbursts and spiderwebs.
“I’ve always been interested in uniqueness,” Mays stated, “working with base materials that rely on hand processes.” Such an embodied strategy requires endurance, which in its solitary manufacturing generally drifts towards entropy. “I’m taking patterns to such repeated iterative extremes that they often start to fall apart.”
Aspen Mays, Webs, Windows, Templates 15, 2024
Aspen Mays, Webs, Windows, Templates 14, 2024
Aperture Magazine Subscription
0.00
Get a full yr of Aperture—the important supply for images since 1952. Subscribe in the present day and save 25% off the quilt value.
We sometimes take into consideration craft in images as aligned with technical precision, repeatability, and visible constancy, however Mays’s photographs defy such virtues. The hand is privileged over the attention so that each photogram reveals traces of guide manipulation and darkroom likelihood—a pinhole, a lightweight leak. Her work invitations the viewer right into a story of its making. The intricate, imperfect human components behind her analog picture creation counter our grasping consumption of ever-optimized digital images.
Mays was raised in Charleston, South Carolina, and now lives within the Bay Area. Her father was an architect. Before he switched to digital design instruments, his house drafting desk was a supply of limitless fascination to Mays, littered because it was with rulers, erasers, pencils, and templates to make virtually any conceivable form. For a current sequence produced on the Rauschenberg Residency on Florida’s Captiva Island, Mays used templates inherited from her father and grandfather, who was additionally an architect. “I love the uniformity and how they standardize space,” she stated, recalling how her grandfather’s and father’s arms had traced strains with these instruments.
Aspen Mays, Webs, Windows, Templates 16, 2024
Aspen Mays, Bandanna, 2016
One photogram, Blind Pass (2025), captures a semitranslucent template, which was repeatedly uncovered on a folded sheet of paper. Mays organized the template in order that the lacy rows of diminishing ovals converge. The composition sparkles between an association of strange objects and one thing extra galactic, like a supernova.
Cosmic themes thread by means of her work, connecting acts of the arms with acts of the heavens. For the sequence Punched out stars (2011), Mays used a perforator to riddle gelatin-silver prints rejected from the University of Chile’s Astronomical Observatory archive, subtracting each seen star. The result’s clusters of enigmatic white circles and fabric-like creases. “The cosmic is a totally dizzying thing to confront—the smallness of your experience or the vastness of the universe,” she stated. “It’s a way for me to think through the conundrum of experience.”
Tengallon Sunflower (2016) is a extra private, earthbound undertaking. Two bandanas are on the coronary heart of the photogram sequence: a starburst-patterned textile inherited from her great-grandmother and an indigo-and-white material owned by Georgia O’Keeffe. Mays pricked out the starburst sample with a pin, marring the cotton rag gelatin-silver paper, then dyed the paper utilizing indigo and different blues that resemble cyanotypes and diazo blue-prints.
Mays likes the intimacy of a bandana, how the sq. of cloth was designed to be knotted ever so snugly across the neck. “Sense memory feels antithetical to photography, which, of course, privileges a visual kind of memory,” she stated. Her work is a meditation on the character of contact. Not in caresses or gestures that require an artist’s hand—folding, pinning, punching, dyeing—however in the best way a stray fingerprint or scratch flouts photographic mores and disrupts a pristine floor. Her transgressions at midnight remake the strange into one thing unusual, transcendent, and superbly in any other case.
Aspen Mays, Webs, Windows, Templates 18, 2024
Aspen Mays, O’Keeffe, 2016
All works courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures
This article initially appeared in Aperture No. 261, “The Craft Issue.”
This web page was created programmatically, to learn the article in its unique location you may go to the hyperlink bellow:
https://aperture.org/editorial/the-photographer-who-sees-with-her-fingertips/
and if you wish to take away this text from our web site please contact us
