This description of how my art is made is only an overview of the Hair, Ash, and Actual Product Art processes which I have experimented with for several decades.
I start by formulating and applying special liquid light sensitive photographic emulsions onto a substrate that is usually paper. When the coating is exposed to light, it forms an invisible image, or latent image. I can then control the emulsion to affix itself to nearly any material whereby forming a continuous tone picture made entirely of nearly any material. I am not putting material over a regular photo. The pictures I make are made entirely of the product itself. Depending on the material being applied, I may use a thin protective coating over the art which may be needed such as on Hair-Art because the hair is fluffy and the material not touching the emulsion needs to be held together as well.
In preparing the product (prior to applying to the emulsion), I either grind or crush the material. Hair for example needs to be cut. The finer I cut the hair, the more detail the picture will have. A handful of hair may turn into a teaspoon of product which may be enough for a small piece of art depending on if there is a lot of dark areas in the picture or not. Dark areas will require more material than a lighter area.
Describing detail is very similar to the way conventional photography works whereby the finer the light sensitive silver particles are, the finer detail the picture will have. Again, the finer the hair is, the more detail there is, but the less recognizable the hair looks as hair. If larger pieces of hair are used, then a larger picture would need to be made in order to see both larger pieces of hair and also have good image detail. The Hair-Art with my mother and myself is made from heirloom hair from my mother from fifty plus years ago. In this Hair-Art, I used larger pieces of hair, but the image lost some of the detail.
I see the distinction between my photography and conventional or digital photography in this way. What would a picture be worth if it was made entirely of the hair or ashes from someone really famous and admired? Gandhi, Disney, Princess Diana, John Lennon, Elvis, Einstein just to name a few. What about pictures of Astronauts made from moon rock, ( even though I will never get to work with this material), or hair from soldiers turned into images showing their frustration and loss. A picture made entirely of ants, seeds, pollen, different colored soil, or nearly anything.
Using the hair of cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy to make pictures with showing their struggles. Ashes from people who are dying of AIDS or other illnesses turned into photo memorials. This is a new dimension of photographic art because it encapsulates both time and matter as one. I believe that the material pictures are made with can be on par to the importance to the image itself because this photography becomes an artistic DOCUMENT. I think the distinction between regular photography and Actual Product Art is like the difference between photographing a picture of something verses having part of the real thing. This photographic art brings photography closer to becoming the real thing.
At some point in the future, but not just yet, I hope to write a book on the different processes I developed simply “FinkArt”, and to teach others so they can expand upon my work since I too am only a little piece of the puzzle.
© 2007
Bill Fink