From the 21st to the 23rd of September 2018, artists from the London Alternative Photography Collective will be exhibiting at the Unseen Photography Fair CO-OP in Amsterdam. The exhibiting artists will be Melanie King, Almudena Romero, Diego Valente, Hannah Fletcher, Simone Mudde, Ramona Guntert, Dafna Talmor and Oliver Raymond-Barker. The theme drawing together works from each artist is a certain strangeness which is encountered in the natural world, with some artists using natural materials to create photographic prints.

To promote the accessibility of alternative and analogue photographic processes, artists Dafna Talmor and Oliver Raymond Barker will create hands-on workshops throughout the duration of the fair. Diego Valente will create a performance especially for Unseen.

You can find out how to support our project via Crowdfunder here.

Almudena Romero

Almudena Romero will show a series of chlorophyll prints, which uses this organic printing process and found archive images to reflect on the archive as a medium for identity construction, but also a mean to produce artwork, and on the environmental impact of deregulation of goods and capitals. By altering the photosynthesis process of a plant, Almudena creates image objects that reflect on the increasing restrictions of movement for persons and the reduction of regulatory barriers for goods and capitals. The artist will be presenting pot plants that are originally from Asia, Mexico and the Caribbean Islands and still widely available on a daily basis markets in London.

Diego Valente

Diego Valente will be exhibiting a new series of prints of plants photographed at night, using a unique solarisation process which brings out the metallic properties of the silver. This series of prints will also be accompanied by a unique performance.

Ramona Guntert

Ramona will be presenting works that challenge the medium of photography and its existence as prints. Ramona creates spaces with images, shapes and abstraction, collaging, layering, different materials. These collages will expand through the booth creating a dialogue between the artist and the audience. Taking fragments from nature and connecting them in new ways, building a language that the artist calls her own taxidermy. Ramona gets inspired everyday by graffiti, wall textures and patterns in nature. These organic shapes inform her practice. How things overgrow or disappear and how this shapes the walls of the city and its architecture. She uses different materials, to create a feeling (ideas of becoming, transforming, subject object relation) without revealing what we are looking at.

Hannah Fletcher

Hannah will explore the relationship between the photographic surface and organic matter. The work is a flow between processes and materials, between research and exploration, between the poetic and political. Entwining organic matter into the photographic medium, working with uprooted plants, she will apply photographic and non-photographic chemicals directly to exposed black and white silver gelatin paper. She will then incorporate an uprooted and water starved plant to the print as it develops and dries. The resulting images will contain the marks of absorption or osmosis; the uptake by plant roots. The discarded salts on the paper will crystallise as the water is absorbed by the plant or evaporates. Where the roots have been in contact with the paper, salt crystallisation will map out their structureSimone Mudde

Simone Mudde’s latest work in progress takes colour separation photography as its subject matter. Three monochrome images are exposed using coloured filters and subsequently layered in the darkroom (or via digital editing) to constitute a colour image. Developed in the early 20th century as a means for making colour images, the process was traditionally followed with a meticulous attention to detail. In order for an accurate colour image to be produced, the three separations demanded perfect composition and accurate exposure. Any failure to do so could result in alignment issues as well as glitches of colour. In the case of Mudde, failure is taken as a narrative and basis for the work to be built on. Errors are used to identify the passing of time, the latency of movement, and furthermore to break down the colours that are perceived within the images.

Melanie KingMelanie will exhibit a new 16mm film, which draws attention to an oft forgotten element of our landscape, the Moon - an illuminated lantern which seems to make a journey through through the sky. Caught up in the busy tumult of life, we forget that Earth too is moving, spinning on its axis at 1040 miles per hour.

Dafna Talmor, Constructed Landscapes – Constructed Worlds WorkshopIn this hands-on slide collaging workshop, participants are provided with an archive of 35mm found vintage slides and are invited to appropriate images by making physical interventions. Tampering with the materiality of the surface by collaging, drawing, scratching or layering fragments of the reconfigured transparencies, participants will re-project the slides and photograph them digitally. Using Selphy printers, these digital files can be printed immediately (and manipulated further beyond the workshop). Participants will get to keep their one-off collaged slides, prints as well as digital files of the projected images they produce. In dialogue with historical as well as contemporary processes that engage with the materiality of film - from Pictorialism, Modernism and current photographic practice - the workshop presents the opportunity to combine analogue and digital processes, experiment with different materials and enables participants to produce work in a short space of time that reflects the medium’s malleability and versatility in a playful way. As well as running a workshop, Dafna will be showing work that has not been exhibited previously.

Oliver Raymond-Barker, The Latent Image Workshop

In this alchemical workshop visitors will discover the latent potential of the photographic image. Working with the Chemigram process they will use pre-exposed black & white paper combined with photographic chemicals to create unique prints. Unlike conventional photographic techniques, Chemigrams are made under normal lighting conditions making it an accessible activity. Using a range of simple masking techniques - such as electrical tape and sticky back plastic - will allow participants to explore the dynamic between geometric form and the unpredictable, organic results generated by the Chemigram process. The technique combines elements of painting and printmaking as well as photography, thereby initiating dialogue around the nature of the photographic medium and it’s relationship to other art forms.
Oliver will also be exhibiting chemigrams within the exhibition.