Adam Fuss

"Love" by Adam Fuss. 1992.

A library patron stopped by the circulation to discuss my work. He's also in Sunanda's class with me, and I'd mentioned doing alternative processes in a discussion when the subject of historical photography came up in class. We spent a bit discussing salt prints and lumen prints, talking about what kind of work I'm doing and why he was interested. Apparently he's doing lumen prints and is trying to understand the process a bit better, and how to handle the prints for long term storage.

After looking at some of my work, he suggested I look up Adam Fuss, so I did. I recall seeing some of his photograms during the class trip to NYC, but I wasn't really amazed by what I saw back then. I'm not really amazed by what I see doing some research on him now. I like the idea of the subject interacting directly with the photo-reactive medium, but not so much the end result of his work. I'm also blown over by his theoretical basis, either.

Still, it's good to look at people that aren't bang on with what you want. They're a bit off, not quite thrilling, but there's still things you can take away from them. Fuss doesn't do long exposures, quite unusual for photograms. Instead he uses very powerful strobes to create the exposures. For his Intestines series, he does leave the material (guts, blood, etc) in place on the photo paper for a long time, allowing the paper to react to the material, but the exposure itself is quite fast. That's an interesting approach.