CONTACT STATES
Series Notes
Contact States
Sequential works recorded through analogue contact.
These works return to the contact sheet as a finished photographic object.
Produced directly from sequential exposures made on medium format film, each work records the unfolding of a constructed optical event through time. The full sequence is retained, allowing variation, interruption, failed states and transitional moments to remain visible.
The work begins before long before the exposure. The butterfly specimens are bred within the studio, making their development part of the extended material process through which the photographic conditions are constructed. Suspended within controlled liquid conditions, water acts as both medium and lens. Its surface tension redirects light across the specimens as the sequence records these unstable optical conditions directly onto film.
The contact sheet preserves this process intact.
What would traditionally remain hidden in the studio remains present within the final work. Shifts in surface tension, minute movement, changing reflections and variations in optical compression accumulate frame by frame until the sequence itself becomes form.
The contact sheet emerged as the final form only after the exposures had been made.
The original positives were revisited years later, revealing that selection had obscured something essential: the movement between images carried equal weight to the images themselves.
The delay became part of the work.
What first appeared as documentation gradually revealed itself as resolution. Distance allowed the sequence to separate from the conditions of its making and become visible as a work in itself.
It is a form of slow recognition.
Some works revealed themselves immediately upon return. Others required repeated viewing before their structure became apparent. In each case, the interval between exposure and realisation proved essential to understanding what had been recorded.
The contact sheet therefore operates simultaneously as record and resolution.
Each work is realised as a unique photographic object.
No frames are reordered. No unsuccessful exposures are removed. Blank intervals, partial forms and moments of collapse remain part of the record.
The image is not selected from the sequence.
The sequence is the image.
Contact States VI — Film 070–084, 2026.
Photography
unique work
89 × 115 cms
35 × 45.3 in