Photo of the Week #231

February 6, 2023
Patricia A. Bender revisits the earliest processes and materials of darkroom photography in her enigmatic (and camera-less) abstractions. Some of her works use a photogram method, with compositions formed by placing objects directly on photo paper, which is then exposed to light. Many of her most compelling works employ a combination of paper negatives and the lesser known cliché-verre (glass plate) process—both pioneered in the early 19th century by English scientist Henry Fox Talbot. 

Bender draws directly on top of these photo impressions with colored pencil, similar to hand-colored photographs. Her linework floats elegantly in deep space, bringing to mind calculations marked on a chalkboard. The precisely rendered drawing in her work evokes the tool-aided, yet hand-drawn, draftsmanship of cartographers, astronomers, and cosmographers who expanded the limits of human understanding in the pre-digital age.

—Jacob Cartwright