Evidence from the Religion of Technology: Large colour photograms
About this ebook
Evidence from the Religion of Technology is a stunning project that pushes the photograms to another level. The series benchmarks a significant shift in Godman's art practice. Here we see a schism from camera, film, and monochromatic photography into the exploration of the photogram (camera-less photography) which embraces the abstract use of vibrant colour. A wide range of objects are used to create the colours and tonal modulations in the images. The camera, too often seen as the essential component of photography, is discarded as irrelevant. Light, the essential activating force of photography is embraced.
The multiple exposure colour photogram process reproduces mundane objects in an abstract colour that is further disguised by the resulting ghost-like negative representation typical of photograms.
Godman uses the technique to explore issues of the consumer society and the eventual discarding of objects as detritus. In the images, visual reference to found objects lie visually entwined, obscured, and even fused as a new unidentified relic. He compares our obsession with technology to a religious fanaticism, that drives our desire for the new and yet also the disposal of the old. A form of visual form of archeology is required to decipher the content of the images, sifting over the remains of a catastrophic event, where remnants of objects are all that remain.
Within the body of colour photogram works are several sub-series. Single prints, long strips, human figures, and the key work, Evidence from the Religion of Technology, which is a large and, ambitious. This piece includes three full figures, arms outstretched (a female figure, a male figure, and a human skeleton) with a series of associated prints arranged in a linear form, the work spreads for 22 meters across the gallery wall.
The ebook offers an intriguing context, with an insight from the initial experiments with photograms of Fox Talbot in the late 1820s, through the simultaneous rediscovery and adaption by Man Ray and the surrealists in France, and Maholy Nagy and the Bauhaus in Germany a century later. It also includes contemporary works by Alex Syndikas and Harry Nankin and other photogram artists.
About the author
Lloyd Godman is an ecological artist based in Melbourne, Australia.
Lloyd Godman has an MFA from RMIT University Melbourne (1999) and has had over 45 solo exhibitions and been included in more than 250 group exhibitions. He established and was head of the photo section at the School of Art, Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand for 20 years before moving to Melbourne. He instigated and helped organize several major arts events including:
• Photographs 86: 30 exhibitions of photography, 3 workshops and 7 lectures on photography in Dunedin during a 4 week period.
• Art in the Subantarctic: an expedition of 11 artists to the Subantarctic Islands of New Zealand. Which included such artists as Bill Hammond, Lawrence Aberhart. At the time the touring exhibition from this exhibition toured more venues than any previous exhibition organized by the Art Gallery directors Council.
His work has always been highly experimental, and he began experimenting with combination monochromatic photograms in 1989.
It is doubtful if Australasia has a more protean, visionary and ecologically committed artist than Lloyd Godman. Born in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1952, and now living in Melbourne, Australia, he has been exploring environmental issues through photography (in combination with sculpture, painting and installations) since the early 1980s. He began taking more or less traditional landscape pictures in the late 1960s, but exposure to iconoclastic artists like Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, and Joseph Beuys inspired him to begin chipping at the edges of photography in the interest of breaking down boundaries.
Black and White magazine USA issue 57 2008
