Visualising the Invisible

Cymatic Water + Light, Plate 0162

Abstract

Visualising the Invisible: Resonance, Water and Light as Photographic Event traces a four decade investigation into photography as physical event rather than descriptive mechanism. Spanning the caustic works of the Vanitas, Glass and Ophelia series through to the recent Cymatic Water + Light body of work, this essay proposes that invisible forces such as resonance, pressure, frequency and surface tension do not require invention. They require conditions through which they become legible. Working exclusively in analogue process, Alexander James Hamilton constructs systems in which frequency, liquid and light are brought into controlled relation. The resulting photographs are not representations of these forces but their material consequence. Authorship, in this context, is not diminished through physical process. It is intensified by it.

Photography has long been understood as a mechanism for describing appearances. Light enters the camera, strikes a surface and fixes what stood before it. The photograph becomes a representation of the visible world.

My own practice has gradually moved elsewhere.

Over four decades of working with analogue processes, I have become less interested in photographing objects than in constructing conditions. Water, light, pressure, duration and resonance are brought into relation and permitted to act upon one another. The resulting photograph is not conceived as an illustration of these forces but as their material consequence.

The image is not the objective. It is the trace left behind by an event.

To speak of visualising the invisible is therefore slightly misleading. Invisible forces are not absent. They are active continuously but remain beyond ordinary perception until they encounter a medium capable of registering them. Surface tension reveals pressure. Water reveals movement. Light reveals structure.

Photography, at its most rigorous, can reveal not only what is seen but the conditions through which visibility itself comes into being. This possibility has occupied much of my recent work.

The question of how invisible forces become perceptible is not unique to photography. It runs through the history of scientific instrumentation as persistently as it runs through the history of art. When Robert Hooke¹ pressed a violin bow against a glass plate dusted with sand, the nodal lines that appeared were not invented, they were disclosed. When astronomers infer the presence of dark matter not from observation but from the gravitational distortion of light around it, they are reading an absence through its effects on matter. When neuroimaging renders thought as colour across a cortical map, the image does not contain the thought, it contains the consequence of the thought. In each case, the method is the same: construct conditions sensitive enough that an otherwise inaccessible phenomenon leaves a material trace⁹. Photography, used rigorously, belongs to this continuum.

I — Light as Structure

Light is often treated as passive within photography, as though its role begins and ends with illumination. For me, light is not neutral. It is material. It has direction, pressure, behaviour and consequence.

For four decades the studio has been organised around a recurring proposition: that water can function not only as subject but as optical mechanism. A surface of purified water is held under controlled conditions, illuminated at shallow angles through custom-built fixtures and baffles that eliminate all stray return and introduced into the path of light. The subject itself remains secondary. The work begins when the liquid surface becomes active.

As the surface enters movement, light ceases to behave predictably. It concentrates. It disperses. It folds.

Surface tension begins to act as lens and structure emerges from instability.

These shifting concentrations of illumination are commonly described as caustics. They are often mistaken for lighting effects or aesthetic embellishments, yet they are neither. A caustic is evidence. It marks the point at which light has been reorganised through encounter with a material condition. What becomes visible in the photograph is therefore not simply the object before the camera but the behaviour of light itself as it passes through changing conditions.

The image does not describe a subject. The image records a relationship.

Across earlier bodies of work — Vanitas, Glass, A Beautiful Announcement of Death — flowers, glass, figures and constructed environments became vehicles through which these interactions could unfold. The work was never intended to represent water. Water remained largely invisible except through the effects it produced. The visible image became the consequence of forces acting beyond immediate perception. 

´Witness´, from ´A Beautiful Announcement of Death´, 2012

In Witness, from A Beautiful Announcement of Death (2012), the caustic field travels directly across the body, the face, the forearm and the exposed collarbone. The bands are not decorative. They are evidence that light has passed through a moving surface before arriving at the figure. Remove the water and the figure would be lit. With the water, the figure is disclosed.

´Grace´, from ´Vanitas´, 2010

In Grace (2010), from the Vanitas series, the luminosity identified by Dr Michael Petry² is not a lighting decision. It is the surface above the scene, in motion, performing the role a baroque glaze once performed, making the image possible. 

The Dutch seventeenth century built its still life tradition around how light becomes meaning through material. Grace enters that tradition not by imitating its optical language but by producing it from within a water tank.

In the Glass works, a rose is placed in a controlled liquid environment where pigment is gradually displaced by purified water while the surface above continues its optical work.

What emerges is not a photograph of a rose, but a record of what a rose becomes under these conditions — its veining exposed, its colour held within a structure of translucence. The caustic is no longer banded but distributed, operating across the entire specimen as a condition of visibility. 

´Glass Plate 0603´, from ´Glass´, 2010

Paul Carey-Kent³ has placed these images in dialogue with Gerhard Richter's scraped canvases, and the equivalence of trace is well made — both register their own process. The difference is fundamental. Richter's surface is worked materially. Mine is optical. A moving water surface redistributes light in a way that parallels how a brush redistributes pigment. The resemblance is a consequence of method, not an aim.

No post-production resolves the image. This is not ideology. It is physics. To edit in software is to introduce a second system with no knowledge of the first. The caustic field recorded in camera already contains the exact behaviour of light under the exact conditions of that exposure. No subsequent operation can extend or correct that record without altering it.

¨  The use of post-production here would be the equivalent of pouring concrete down a water well. ¨

Light was no longer being used simply to describe the subject. It was being reorganised into structure.

This distinction became increasingly important. If light itself could become unstable and generative rather than descriptive, then the photograph could begin to record relationships that ordinarily remain inaccessible to direct observation.

II — Resonance Recorded as Structure

If caustics revealed the behaviour of light through liquid, the cymatic works ask a related question.

What happens when the surface itself becomes structured by frequency?

Cymatics provides a point of entry, but not a subject. 

´Ernst Chladni · Sand-plate figure No. 8, circa 1800

When Ernst Chladni⁴ first demonstrated that vibration could organise matter into visible form, he established a principle rather than an image. These experiments are often treated as illustrations. Here, they are understood as operating conditions. I do not depict cymatic phenomena. I construct the conditions under which they occur.

Faraday standing wave, Plate 0152 from ´Cymatic Water + Light´, 2022

Within Cymatic Water + Light, a contained field of water is subjected to frequency. Energy enters the medium. At certain thresholds, resonance is achieved. The system stabilises momentarily into coherent geometries: standing waves, nodal fields and temporary structures of force.

These structures are not imposed. They are the system resolving itself. What becomes visible at this stage is not the frequency itself. Frequency remains invisible. The image appears because resonance reorganises the liquid surface into a temporary optical field. Peaks and troughs alter the angle at which light is reflected, concentrated and dispersed. The wave is never photographed directly.

Its passage becomes legible through the way it reorganises light. The exposure records that redistribution.

The photograph is made at that point. What is recorded is not a pattern. At a certain scale, these liquid structures suggest relationships beyond the immediate system. Not as metaphor, but as behaviour. A vibrating liquid surface becomes a field of interaction in which waves intersect, interfere and stabilise into temporary order.

What becomes visible is not the wave itself, but the trace of its passage through matter.

What appears as pattern is the residue of interaction.

What appears as image is the record of that residue.

The painterly quality often attributed to these works is not derived from reference to painting. It emerges from the behaviour of the system. The resemblance to gesture or mark is incidental.

The resulting images can appear computational, synthetic or digitally generated because they exceed what is commonly expected from photographic description. They are neither.

LIGO & LISA⁶ a new laser detector system to study gravitational waves (image courtesy Nasa)

No structure is imposed. No geometry is drawn. No post-production resolves the image. The forms arise physically and are fixed directly onto film. What appears in the final work existed before the exposure.

These forms are not illustrations of resonance. They are resonance.

What appears within the frame is not symbolic language but a physical event becoming visible. The photograph does not depict hidden forces. It records their effects upon matter.

This position extends a methodology developed over four decades.

In earlier works, light is forced through an unstable liquid plane, where surface tension acts as lens, reorganising illumination into caustic structure before reaching the subject.
In the cymatic works, the same medium is activated differently. The structuring force is no longer light passing through the surface. It is frequency operating within it.

The mechanism is constant. The excitation differs.

Cymatic Water + Light, Plate 0825

What appears in the final work existed before the exposure.

These forms are not illustrations of resonance. They are resonance.

What appears within the frame is not a symbolic language but a physical event becoming visible. This distinction has remained central to the work. The photograph does not depict hidden forces. It records their effects upon matter.

This position extends a methodology developed over four decades. In earlier works, light is forced through an unstable liquid plane, where surface tension acts as a lens, reorganising illumination into caustic structure before it reaches the subject. In the cymatic works, the same medium is activated differently. The structuring force is no longer light passing through the surface, but frequency operating within it.

The mechanism is constant. The excitation differs.

III — The Artist as System Builder

The language of image-making implies direct control. Composition. Arrangement. Selection. These remain important, but they are insufficient descriptions of how these works are made.

I do not begin with the intention to make an image.

I begin by establishing conditions.

Water. Light. Frequency. Containment. Duration.

These become variables within a constructed system. The outcome cannot be predicted in detail. Only the conditions for emergence can be prepared.

Plate 7047, from Oil + Water, Siberia, 2014

This approach does not exist in isolation. The same principles governed work made in Siberia, along the Yenisei river, at −50°C — where crude oil and river water were drawn from the same geological strata and introduced within timber forms on frozen river surfaces. There is no time to compose in those conditions. Only a point at which instability briefly resolves into coherence before collapse. 

The photograph is a recording of that point. It is not an interpretation of the event. It is the condition under which the event is made visible.

Cymatic Water + Light, Plate 0166

When Harold Edgerton⁷ used the stroboscope to reveal phenomena beyond perception, the image did not describe the world — it extended it. The camera functioned as an instrument not of selection, but of disclosure. This distinction remains critical. The camera does not determine the outcome. It registers that an outcome has occurred.

Jack Burnham⁸ wrote that the specific function of modern art had been to reveal the underlying structures of systems, he identified a shift that has since become operational. The work is no longer defined by the object, but by the system that produces it. Walter Benjamin described the singular presence of the work as bound to its existence in time and space. In this practice, each event occurs once. The photograph remains as its only material trace.

The role of the artist, in this context, is not primarily to compose appearances but to establish conditions. The work emerges from the construction of a system capable of producing outcomes that remain unavailable to direct intention.

Authorship is not diminished through this process.

It becomes more demanding.

The variables must be chosen. The thresholds established. The conditions maintained. The system tuned carefully enough that an event may occur. Yet once activated, the work must still be allowed to become itself. Form is not applied. It emerges. The image becomes a collaboration between decision and consequence.


In this sense, authorship resides in the conditions, not the result.

The photograph does not conclude the process. It marks the point at which the process becomes visible. Once that point has passed, the system collapses. The water stills. The energy dissipates.

Nothing within the configuration survives.

IV — Human Authorship and the Photograph as Event

Questions surrounding authorship have become increasingly urgent. Images can now be produced without requiring contact with the world. Convincing appearances may emerge without light, exposure, resistance or event.

My own position remains rooted elsewhere.

Photography interests me because of its dependency upon reality.

Light acts. Matter responds. Time passes. Something occurs. The exposure becomes the meeting point between those conditions. This is not nostalgia for analogue process. It is a commitment to causality.

A photograph retains its force because it remains connected to an event that existed outside itself.
The image cannot be separated from the conditions of its making.

Within the cymatic works this connection becomes particularly visible.

Sound enters water. Water reorganises. Light responds. Film receives the consequence.

The resulting photograph remains materially linked to the event from which it emerged. Its authority comes not from resemblance but from contact.

This question of causality has become increasingly important. The role of the artist, in this context, is not primarily to compose appearances but to establish conditions. The work emerges from the construction of a system capable of producing outcomes that remain unavailable to direct intention.

What you see is what occurred.

V — The Invisible Leaves Evidence

Invisible forces do not require invention. They require conditions through which they can become legible.

Resonance remains invisible until matter begins to move. Light remains invisible until it encounters resistance. Structure remains invisible until conditions allow it to emerge.

Photography occupies a unique position within this threshold.

It allows transient conditions to persist. It preserves relationships that otherwise disappear.

The photograph does not solve invisibility. It does not explain it.

It allows the invisible to leave evidence of itself.

The works discussed here are not attempts to depict hidden worlds. They are records of physical events through which hidden relationships became briefly visible.

Water becomes lens. Light becomes structure. Resonance becomes form.

The photograph remains.

And in remaining, carries forward the trace of something that once occurred but can never occur in exactly the same way again. 

Alexander James Hamilton on the banks of the Kama River, Perm, Siberia, 2023.