Thinking About Photography

Amanda Tinker

amandatinker.com

Small Animal

In this series of photographs I arrange details from nature collected from my family garden, children’s books and vintage identification guides, behind large glass panels. Each photograph looks at the natural world as if it were held just for our observation, suspended far from any recognizable landscape. Nature’s small beauties, such as birds, butterflies, twigs and petals become objects of contemplation, organized into layered configurations. As arrangements these are illusions. I am inspired by the “impossible bouquet” of Dutch still life, where flowers that would never bloom together in nature are painted together in lavish arrays.  

©Amanda Tinker

Untitled (Snakes and Fern), 2018

Platinum/Palladium, 8x10

The 8x10” view camera used to make these photographs factors greatly into the work. The rather large piece of glass at the back of the camera, where each image is composed before exposure, offers inspiration. It is a projection screen for my interest in the early history of photography, particularly as a tool for studying nature. One can imagine an era just before the dawn of photography where views of nature stirred on the glass of a camera obscura. Nature had been transformed through optical devices giving way to a diminutive view; the landscape on a smaller, more intimate scale. This project, situated in the 21st century, reflects a more ambivalent, if not estranged, experience of the natural world.

These images are made using a 19th printing process where light sensitive platinum and palladium salts are hand coated onto thin sheets of vellum. Because of the slow nature of the chemistry, darkroom enlargers are ineffective and each negative is printed using UV light boxes outside of the darkroom. There is a direct thread that runs through the work from the flat plane of glass used for arranging, to the ground glass of the camera used for composing, to the delicate vellum sheets on which the images are printed. The handcrafted print is fragile as is the fantasy of each ecosystem constructed for the camera.