Both perfume and photography involve chemical processes. And I think in their Lumen Prototypes, fragrance and photo conceptualists, respectively, Chris Rusak and Amelia Konow are exploring what a photograph of a fragrance could be.
At least that’s the sense I got from the little unique silver gelatin print, and the zine containing evocative essays from the artists, and Rusak’s newly released conceptual fragrances, which I just got as part of his yearlong Analog/Context project. [They’re also sold separately, and at larger scale, above.]
They chose lumen prints, an intricate chemical photographic technique that, like cyanotypes, are made in daylight without a camera. What I think is happening is that Rusak and Konow are capturing the visual expression of fragrances—either composed or in constituent parts, I am not sure, and they’re not saying. They’re both abstract and not: they clearly show traces of their making, or of their subject/materials: liquidity, flow, absorption, dilution, evaporation, color, density.
But that visual record still doesn’t reveal what anything smells like, what the experience is of the fragrance(s), the unfolding over time. That gap resonates with the herculean poetic struggle to explain a perfume—or a picture—in a way that approaches the sensory encounter with it. And even though I don’t know what fragrance I’m looking at, they’ve nevertheless made a picture of it.
Chris Rusak & Amelia Konow: Lumen Prototypes [chrisrusak.com]
Amelia Konow [ameliakonow.com]
Previously, related: Chris Rusak, HOME; Incense Sensibility