At a moment when it seems to be increasingly obsolete, it might be useful to reconsider the crystalline materiality of the photographic object, how much our understanding of the image is occupied by the process itself and how much is the subject – or its context. Perhaps it is not even possible to think about a photograph as an object at all. They now seem to function more as surfaces, or screens, meaningful only for their content, not as a distinct material form, but data flows. Then again, the argument could be made – even persuasively – that photographs were never anything else, despite having a material presence, that we only ever looked through them, toward their illusive spaces of memory and absence, never concerned with this strange displacement of seeing beyond the actual dimensionality of the photograph. The work of Michael Floman goes to the heart of these issues, the alchemy of process, transformations in (what was) the basic substance of photography, to create startling new visual landscapes. There is nothing more “purely” photographic than what he does, leaving a trace, an outline, on the paper – there is a directness of contact in these photograms that once seemed the standard of authenticity for the photograph and that is here – for once – genuinely immediate, a material reality. While they are undoubtedly best viewed in person, an extensive range of work can be found on his website.
