Light Surfaces

Commissioned to make a short film “about photography” Cornish and Braun take an experimental, filmic examination of various forms of photography from the past 150 years, including a Daguerreotype, tintypes, wet collodion plates, glass negatives, 35mm slide film, polaroids and even a Maholy-Nagy photogram from museum and private archives in Berlin. By filming in extreme close-up, while shifting both subject and light, the materiality, structural depth and chemical decay of the photographs’ surfaces are revealed. Photographs appear as multifaceted singular objects in their own right and not “mere reproductions”.