Making not taking Original by Victoria Leighton
Collage of fragments of film negatives, silver gelatin and inkjet prints on paper and acetate
The Petri dish presents a collage of cut-out fragments of discarded negatives, misprints from the darkroom and offcuts from previous collages and my ‘scanography’ process. It examines my post-production based methodology where I move fluidly between analogue and digital in a continuous cycle of deconstruction and construction.
Victoria Elisabeth Leighton is a recent fine art graduate based in St Albans, currently studying MA Photography at University of Hertfordshire. Her work challenges the expanding notion of photography in a fine art context. Recently she has been working on a series of manipulated photographs entitled Dual Landscapes which emerged during lockdown having had to adapt to the pandemic. The images begin as digital long exposures taken of local landscapes, which are abstracted in-camera using intentional camera movements. These are then printed and go through a further transformative process of abstraction through collage or camera-less techniques such as ‘scanography’ where the images or fragments of the images are moved, rotated and combined during scanning. This series references experimental Pictorialist techniques and explores the dualities of landscape and technology; painting and photography; and the analogue and digital divide.
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