Chris Bucklow is one of those artists who in the past could have easily been described by certain critics as "an artist who uses photography" rather than a photographer, caught in the middle of the battle to grasp the meaning of a supposed pure photography that filled so many pages and gave so many headaches.
His work Guests is an ongoing series of pinhole human silhouettes made with thousands of tiny holes on sheets of aluminium foil, through which light exposes photographic paper.
From the press release of his exhibition in 2010 at Danziger Projects: "Bucklow begins by projecting the shadow of his sitter on a large sheet of aluminum foil and tracing its outline. He then makes thousands of small pinholes in the foil silhouette, one for each day of the subject's approximate lifespan. Using a contraption of his own device that places the foil over a large sheet of photographic paper, Bucklow wheels his homemade "camera" out into daylight and pulls the "shutter" to briefly expose the paper to direct sunlight. Thus each finished picture becomes a kind of photogram silhouette composed of thousands of pinhole photographs of the sun. The intensity of light on a given day and the length of exposure create unique color variations on how the resulting piece appears."
Human figures made of an amount of light corresponding to the length of their lifespan: perhaps the only way one single photograph could rightfully claim to capture the essence of somebody...
All images taken from the series Guests © Chris Bucklow
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