Marta Michalowska

Prelude to Landscape: Variations for Rocks and Water, 2024

The series was taken during a trip to Oman with Finnish artist Elina Brotherus, where we photographed and performed in each other’s images set within monumental mountainous landscapes both awe-inspiring and troubling, alien and familiar, unmoved yet shaped by human cultures ancient and contemporary.

These images use sound recording film as a photographic medium. This very high contrast, fine grain, slightly orthochromatic, slow analogue film stock has been designed for the recording of sound in an optical format in the film industry. Sound recording film offers an unpredictable and slightly ‘alien’ image of a place, distilled to lines and planes privileging highlights and shadows. It has the potential for representing the peripheries of reflected light to record images of places that are far from the flat and flexible ‘perfect photographic negative’ that captures the full range of tones and allows the photographer to control the contrast and tonality in the darkroom. These images leave little room for manipulation in post-production. The captured light cannot be bent at will.

Photographing with sound recording film is a form of ‘hearing’ a place and ‘composing’ in collaboration with both its solid and transitory elements. The image is the score, weaving the place and the moment together.