When I see, I breathe light
When I see, I breathe light
2018-2019
Archival pigment prints on baryta paper
24”x 36” each.
How do you catch a breath? How do you hold light? How do you hang on to a memory?
When I see, I breathe light continues to my interest and research in photographic time, memory, the senses, motion, and light. In this series of images, I consider the aperture of the camera in relation to the eye as it sees light, and the mouth as it breathes. Using hand-made colour filters and mirrored surfaces to separate moments in time, I make double exposures within the space of a breath - 2 seconds inhale, 3 seconds exhale. Passing and moving each filter in front of the camera lens combined with the subtle movements the body makes as it breaths, reflects, bends, and activates light entering the camera; producing subtle shifts in colour, traces of motion, and distortion. The resulting images are soft, imperfect, experimental, and ethereal multiple exposures that contain mirror imagery of my surroundings in addition to what I’m looking at with a lens. They suggest something akin to a memory rather than a recorded moment. Colour becomes scent, and motion resembles thought passing through the mind. Looking outward from the body toward the sky or through a window, the camera becomes an extension of the body that attempts to see rather than to record. As a result, the images in When I see, I breathe light produce encounters that speak to the slowness of time and the process of recording an experience that relates more to the rhythms of the body than it does to mechanical or digital reproduction.
Natalie Hunter wishes to acknowledge the generous
support of the Canada Council for the Arts in producing this body of work.