The Countless Laughter of the Ocean: where it began

This seems to the only page I saved from a book I found in a salvage shop in California back in the 90s. When I came across it recently, I was kind of floored at how I had managed to forget it. I tracked down the article that it was drawn from, and you can download it here. It’s basically a status report on the pursuit of color photography, delivered by one Sir William Herschel, son of Sir John Herschel, the man who gave photography its name. At the time, some progress had been made on multiple methods of recording a color image, but none of them were fully viable. Herschel waxed poetic in accounting for the many efforts of the photographic innovator, recommending that scientist and artist alike face their frustrated endeavors like “the countless laughter of the ocean, upon which God’s great gift of light dances and entrances us.” So many implications for us over a century later, as our own endeavors are entangled with both the salt of the oceans from which life emerged, and the plastic that we’ve doomed it to host without end.

Refract Journal

2022 saw my first publication in a peer-reviewed journal. I’ll admit that one of the reasons I submitted photographs to Refract Journal was their title—hey, you like things that refract, I can set you up, right? But seriously, the journal is published by the visual studies programs at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the legendary base camp of daring thinkers like Donna Haraway, whose writing I’ve been spending a lot of time with in the past few years. So it meant a lot to me that the editors wanted not only to use the photographs but to give me editorial guidance in completing a legitimate article to accompany them. It’s not every day that people want to hear that much about why I do this work, and I aim to write more about it in the coming months. You can download the issue of Refract Journal or read online.

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Other

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Other was a show about the imaginative life of domestic spaces, the creatures we share them with, and the materials that hold everything together. The show was open for two weekends in August at BlankSpace, an artist-owned mid-renovation house in Wilkinsburg.

Earlier this year, Travis Mitzel, Lauren Braun and I found ourselves in a conversation about how plastics figure into our respective art practices, which are very different from each other. Travis has produced a number of very compelling projects about animals. He and I had shared a table at a zine fair last year, where I was selling my little books and photos of salt crystals, and he had some literature about his Anti-Extinction Company. On the table with our wares was an adorable, robust, pink-gilled axolotl in a clear Sterilite tub. Travis raises axolotls, which it turns out are much more numerous in captivity than in the polluted wetlands of their native Mexico. He’d brought one along as a representative of the company, which operates by selling water from axolotl tanks as an organic plant food. The proceeds help subsidize the creatures in their human-facilitated urban habitat.

You’d be hard pressed to meet an artist who can bring more to the table than Travis when it comes to the rolling catastrophe of the Anthropocene, and its impact on all kinds of species. He has an ongoing project about goldfish, through which I learned about how these fish spend a substantial part of their lives in single-occupancy plastic bags, being shipped around the world in massive quantities through the global merchandise logistics system. They’re sold, won, or given away in those bags, and dispersed into homes one by one. Consumers often eventually release them into the wild, and over time they’ve naturalized in waterways just about everywhere humans can be found. In the right climate, they can live twenty years or more, easily outcompeting many native species.

We’re all so used to plastics being everywhere we look that it can be hard to notice them, even when we’re looking straight at them. I’ve been photographing single use plastics for years, switching back and forth with salt as a subject; they have a lot in common. This year I started moving forward with a new way of bringing them into the same images, using polarized light. In the photos I’ve been making this year, salt and plastics collaborate in refraction. It’s the plastics that bring color into the images, through the way they bend the polarized light, which is reflected by the surfaces of the salt crystals at different angles. The photos are eventually printed on a variety of plastic substrates: lenticular images, synthetic fabrics, vinyl murals, or specialized light-diffusing photo papers. Plastics carry the images, facilitate the images, constitute the images. Like they used to say on those old TV commercials: we’re soaking in it!

We installed the show in a house that bore many traces of the people who had lived there. In its current state of mid-renovation, the floors were dirty, there was no plumbing, there were holes where light fixtures might have been and in all kinds of other places. There was a lot of grime and dust, and also a lot of subtle, elegant flourishes, in places like mantels, door frames, and partially buffed walls where cracks revealed layers of color from decades ago. Those were the kinds of things that inspired Lauren Braun when she saw these rooms and hallways. Her collages feature accumulations of drawings about the size of the palm of your hand—drawings of different kinds of shells and rocks, architectural interpretations of flowers and leaves.

The house is small in terms of square footage, but everywhere you look it has little niches and corners, which became sites for surprising encounters with Lauren’s colorful mobiles. The gently floating petals of color in these pieces are organic shapes cut from painted Yupo, a synthetic material that takes ink much like watercolor paper.

Lauren also creates unique three-dimensional accumulations that at first look something like bundles of strange flowers, or clusters of mussels. Each of the little rolls in these bundles started out like a painting: different colors of acrylic paint are swirled together in little hand-sized pools. Later, she methodically peels each one off of its surface, and video recordings of this process have won her fans among people who find ASMR recordings soothing. Lauren installed several of these constructions, entitled “offerings to the house,” into holes and crevices in the walls.

As you proceed through the spaces, you end up at the end of a hallway where your perspective shifts a little. As you approach it you see one side of an angle, and as you get closer, you see another side of it, where the symmetrical wall is papered with a mural-sized print of crystals in a color scheme that extends the lavender of the walls. This faces down at a pair of lightboxes that feature a coordinated set of crystal images. On one side of these is a low closet where two mobiles are slowly turning. On the other side is a nested cluster of Lauren’s offerings. These are echoed, across the hallway, by another set, the last piece you see as you leave. On the wall where this is inset, there is a pencil inscription that you can barely see, but if the light is right, you can read it twice: I’m gone. I’m gone.

The show was cut short. I had to miss the first weekend, and among those who visited there were multiple COVID cases; meawhile, my whole family came down with COVID on the trip we were on that weekend. So when I got back, we had to cancel the reception. Lauren generously covered the gallery hours, so a few friends were able to attend that weekend. We did have a pretty cool print piece made as a gallery guide, with a nice Riso-printed cover thanks to Steve Grebinski and Misfeed Press. The illustration on the inside cover was generated by DALL-E2 using a prompt that came from one of the discussions that Lauren, Travis and I had early on: living in this time of impending climate catastrophe can feel like the moment of low tide before a tidal wave arrives, and we are like people wandering across the too-wide beach, collecting shells and strange treasures, trying for the moment to be as present as we can. (Email me your mailing address if you want one or a few of these, we had a lot of them left over.)

Lenticular Photos: Halophilic 2.2 Fun Size

Have you seen the lenticuar prints in the shop? Here’s a little bit of background on these pieces.

About lenticular printing

These are lenticular prints, which use very small-scale prisms to visually merge multiple images. This type of printing became popular in the second half of the 20th century as a format for things like political badges, travel souvenirs, holy cards, and the kind of small toys you might find in a cereal box. Today’s forms of lenticular printing can merge dozens of video frames, create realistic 3D imagery, or even make the effect tiny and flat enough to fit on a postage stamp. The version you see here is the old-fashioned Crackerjack-prize type, which uses two matched photographs with different color effects. The two images are printed in precisely matched, alternating rows, which correspond with the linear lenses. Each little rib on the surface of the print works like a lens to refract what’s behind it, which will shift depending on the angle from which it is seen. As your point of view on the image moves, the image that each little lens directs at your eye will shift from one image to the other. If you’re viewing the lenticular images in person with binocular vision, each eye’s perspective will be slightly different. This creates the shimmering effect of these prints.

Hanging details

These prints are mounted on translucent colored acrylic, which will create a subtle color glow on the wall behind the image when the light is right. (This is artisanal small-batch laser cutting, which I do myself here in the Burgh.) They’re designed to hang casually, slightly off-square. If you want yours to be perfectly level, use poster adhesive strips instead.

Polarized light for color

The crystals you see in these photographs are normal table salt, which has crystalized in a shallow, transparent acrylic dish. This dish is then elevated above a light source, which has been coupled with a polarizing filter. This forces the light to come through in synchronized waves. The light then passes through layers of transparent plastics, which act as retarders. These not technical tools; they’re ordinary single-use plastics, mostly from product packaging. These are chosen for their ability to diffuse the light waves very slightly—just enough to create color effects that further refract when the light waves hit the salt crystals. The camera is pointing straight down at the crystals (and the layers of light, polarizing filter, and plastic retarders beneath them). There’s an additional polarizing filter on the camera that enhances the color effects, and rotating this filter shifts the range of colors that are visible.

Salt and plastic

In geology, the term “halophilic” describes elements of salt-dependent ecosystems, and salt formations are often indicators of petroleum in the earth. In our time, both salt and plastic are everywhere humans are, and most of the places where we are not. As familiar and close at hand as salt is, imagery of it abounds in cultural expression, from the enigmatic to the mundane. Plastics have become as inevitable as salt, and nowhere near as benign. What kind of poetics do we have for a world that is shot through with plastics at every level? What kind of stories could possibly fit the world we’re creating now? 

The average American produces around 286 pounds of plastic waste per year, or an average of 12.5 oz. per day.* That’s about three times the weight of one of these mounted lenticular prints. You can find out more about the life cycle of plastics at thestoryofstuff.com, and if you enjoy podcasts, search for For the Wild on your favorite platform.

Each image used in the Fun Size series is a detail from a larger photograph—specifically, from the series Halophilic 2: On a Molecular Level. There are more photos in this series than what’s currently posted on the website, so follow me on Instagram at @zatopa to see more! And don’t forget to sign up for my mailing list list to find out about upcoming projects.

* Source: K. L. Law, N. Starr, T. R. Siegler, J. R. Jambeck, N. J. Mallos, G. H. Leonard, The United States’ contribution of plastic waste to land and ocean. Sci. Adv.6, eabd0288 (2020)

Taking Up Space: Holding Space and The Most Possible Kind

In May 2022 I worked with a group of artists here in Pittsburgh to mount two related shows exploring the experiences of motherhood. The artists included Sandra Bacchi, Sophia Cardillo, Naomi Chambers, Carrie Smith Libman, Michele Randall, Megan Shope, Alecia Dawn Young, and Stefanie Zito. Most of us met through the process of creating these exhibitions, and our places in along the path of motherhood range from the parent with an empty nest to the process of birth itself—Sophia delivered her second child around two weeks before hanging the shows and wore her tiny newborn during her artist talk!

The Most Possible Kind came from perspectives on parenting as children grow and gradually transition towards independence. We made a short walk-through video of this exhibition, if you’d like to hear more about it.

This show takes its title from a poem by Bradley Trumpfheller called “Reconstructions.” The poem is composed of vividly sketched details, and as you read them they build up a sense of a moment that’s charged with promise and possiblity. Off in the distance there’s just the quickest echo of a mother’s voice, maybe in the distance, maybe just a fleeting memory. I wanted to stand in that mother’s place for a second: what does she know, what does she remember, what does she hope for the “most possible kind?"

This was a particularly meaningful show for me since it gave me the chance to bring some work directly to the Duquesne University community, where I’ve taught for almost as long as I’ve been a parent. At this time my oldest is a college student himself. The experiences of teaching and parenting students at this age during the past few years has kind of put the “loco” in in loco parentis. The challenges that these students have had to face have been so unpredictable, and they are preparing to take on their roles in a world that’s changing dramatically. We’re all constantly trying to re-find our footing, trying to orient ourselves towards a horizon that shifts as soon as we begin to lock focus on it. All of that has been on my mind as I’ve been working on the Halophilic 3 series. There were three prints from that series in this show, presented banner-style on Ultrasuede fabric. I also managed to find a spot for the Small Animal Sort series, which is all about the process of finding names for the roles we want to take on in the world, and seeing how those roles began in the imaginative experiences of early childhood.

Dissolution, as it happened

The stories of salt are human stories. In literature, religion, and history, when we are talking about salt, we are talking about ourselves; when we look at this substance and its peculiar ways, we see figurations of human qualities. Ideas, crystallizing. The taste of tears. Something so common it’s not worth mentioning. Rubbing salt in wounds or plowing it into the soil. Lot’s wife, looking back at her burning home. And so on.

On a material level, the forms that these crystals take are largely dependent on their environmental conditions. I grow these crystals here in an old house, in a climate where temperature and humidity conditions are always fluctuating. Any change creates variations in density, funny shapes and angles, cracks, bubbles, opacity, dustings of tiny crystals that collect on the surface before sinking, countless ways to deviate from clear-edged geometries. These salt crystals take a long time to grow, and any sort of progress can be easily wrecked.

It was the end of 2020. I had a set that had been growing for several months, which had developed some peculiar configurations but were getting interesting to look at. Several had reached a decent size, some of them half an inch across. In preparing to photograph them, I transferred them to a clean dish of saline solution. I quickly realized that the new solution was not fully saturated: the crystals had begun to dissolve. I moved them back to the solution they’d come from, but the process was already underway. I was afraid they were damaged enough that they’d need weeks to build up clean edges like the ones they’d had before, if it were to happen at all (which is never guaranteed). Disappointed, I photographed the best remaining ten of them in a marathon session, and set the images aside. They demanded a lot of focus stacking and were going to take some time to edit, and I prepared to do this on a residency at the beginning of January 2021.

This residency consisted of ten days at Arts Letters and Numbers in rural upstate New York. This was under socially-distanced conditions, which meant working in a farmhouse and cavernous studio with just a few other artists. We shared the spaces amicably and made time for studio visits, but spent most of our days entrenched in solitary work. Each day I’d bundle up to make the trek across the icy street and under towering pines from the house to the studio. The environment was blessedly free of distractions, with no TV and sketchy cell coverage. But there was wifi in the buildings, and I used it to keep in touch.

That was how I found out what was happening in Washington DC on January 6: on my phone, through clips posted to social media. We were respecting one another’s space there, and conversations that day stayed brief and tentative, but as the day unfolded it became clear to all of us that something monumentally terrifying was taking place.

In the studio, I was piecing together a sense of the situation through the twitter feed of writers I followed. Videos took so long to load that I was left mainly with descriptions and reactions. A heavily armed mob had stormed the Capitol in attempt to take over, to do what? Whatever they could; it wasn’t clear; they were chanting about revolution, they were going to halt the confirmation of the election, they wanted to hang the Vice President, they were prepared to kidnap the Speaker of the House, they were hunting down senators, smashing windows, pissing in corridors, trashing offices, beating cops, taking selfies, running off with things they could grab. People were being rushed to undisclosed locations. Bomb threats were announced and never mentioned again. The president-elect was confirmed safe. Eventually the location was secured, the area militarized, a curfew declared.

All day I was trying to stop checking my phone for updates, trying to keep working. Work meant piecing together photographs of these weird little mineral configurations in the process of dissolving. Part of the imaginative appeal of salt is the way it constructs itself more or less before our eyes and can dissolve in an instant, only to rebuild again as water evaporates. Geologists speak of the life cycles of rock formations. We all know that salt is a mineral, something from the earth, once underground, or from the sea. It comes to our tables purified and packaged, but it came from somewhere.

Where did this particular salt come from? We’re just consumers, so how would we know? Salt processing and shipping were the economic cornerstone of the Hudson Valley in generations past. A massive share of American salt now comes from mines stretching deep beneath the Great Lakes, some of them a few miles from my Pittsburgh home. Beneath us, salt is rock. How many millions of years did those strata take to coalesce and build? They are dug out with massive amounts of labor and power. They serve their purpose; they dissipate. Over time, those salt strata disperse into the oceans, and somewhere far away, people might collect it with other forms of labor as it crystalizes under the sun. It flows through our system of production and consumption. Humans around the globe are processing salt all day long as we go about our lives. It surfaces on our foreheads when the heat rises, it run down our cheeks sometimes when we don’t know what’s going to happen next. Things that seem solid turn out to have just seemed that way, because that’s where they were in their life cycle. Sometimes we find that we had been taking a certain perspective on the scope of time for granted.

The photographs I was processing on January 6 became Dissolution. The book was completed in March of 2021 and remains available, in an affordable small form with a special edition that includes a hand-trimmed folder and archival inkjet print.