Review: Shadow Catchers at the V & A

Photography escapes from the camera as five artists at the V&A create images and illusions without pressing the shutter.

An empty chair with the shadow of a woman who once sat in it spilt at its feet; an embroidered christening frock devoid of baby and rendered as a luminous outline like those strands ectoplasm said to be produced by mediums. These strange, double-take images are part of the charm of Shadow Catchers, a new exhibition at the V&A which seems to capture the spirit of the season as the nights draw in and thoughts turn to ghost stories around the ancestral fireplace or steaming pot noodle, depending upon circumstances.

Shadow Catchers looks at the work of five artists who produce camera-less photography using a variety of techniques including the photogram, chemigram and dye destruction prints. Roughly speaking each artist has contributed work with a particular or dominant theme. Floris Neususs who is responsible for the chair haunted by its former occupant concentrates on the human body, Garry Fabian Miller and Susan Derges document natural landscapes and processes. Adam Fuss uses symbols to make us question what we see and what we miss and what meaning we give to our visions, real and imagined. Pierre Cordier, king of the chemigrams, works with photographic paper and a range of substances from photographic developer and fixer to eggs, honey and glue. Manipulating these he can make extraordinarily complex patterns that are part human agency, part chemical chance.

Freed from the camera box these artists have entered into a bodily encounter with the world around them. They then translate and transfer these experiences using paper, paint and dyes and elements and processes like water and the passage of time. Derges records the eddy and flow of the River Taw in Devon by submerging photographic paper in the dark and casting a flashlight over it. In Delphinium 1-8, a series of dye destruction prints, Miller upstages any magic I’ve ever seen by showing the emergence of a single flower petal from faintest shadow to purple-veined glory, an amazing demonstration of light into matter. This is photography as performance and as an intense delight in the processes used to make the images.

Perhaps because of these artists’ immersion in the production process a lot of the images in this exhibition are spatially unsettling, making the viewer lose their sense of perspective, even their sense of self. Looking at the people silhouetted in Neususs’s photograms it struck me that for an instant they’d done what I’d once longed to achieve at a shade-free Mediterranean bus stop – disappearing into the cool, dark camouflage of their own shadows.

Neususs’s shadow people lack the detail and props – clothes, accessories, background setting – that allow us to work out when and where a photo was taken. This timeless, placeless quality gives them great intimacy; the woman with curly hair who sat in the chair could have left decades ago or just a few hours earlier. It also offers visual confirmation of our hope that people can still have a presence in our lives long after they have physically departed – the ethereal is our best defence against oblivion.

The curators of Shadow Catchers point out that by often showing “what has never really existed” these images escape or at least reinterpret photography’s perceived documentary role. Many of the images attempt to capture or imagine things we know exist but cannot quite visualise like the passage of time or the appearance of sound waves. In their efforts to investigate what lies at the edges of or just beyond our vision these five artists have headed off in wonderfully diverse directions.

Miller, fascinated by the process of photosynthesis in plants, gradually abandons the direct representation of flowers and leaves for a more abstract exploration of the nature and characteristics of colour. Night Cell, a blue planet speckled with cosmic dandelion fluff (see above) seems to fuse these two elements of his work.

In Chladni Figures Derges replays the experiments of eighteenth century physicist Ernst Chladni by using an aluminum plate, photographic paper and carborundum powder, a mineral used in printmaking, to picture the patterns caused by sound waves. The result is eight luminous black and white prints, the mineral powder forming patterns that always seem to be roughly torso-shaped with a navel at the centre, an apt expression of the way sound can seem to pulse through our bodies.

Cordier turns to myth and literature – the stories of Daedalus and Jorge Luis Borges – as an inspiration for his maze-like patterns while Fuss has created a series called My Ghost, an autobiography of a haunting with its roots in that disembodied christening robe.

As well as downplaying photography’s documentary role the absence of the camera in this exhibition softens our perception of photography as an intrusion, a theft that snatches rather than catches. Neususs, speaking in a short film about his work, emphasises that photograms are a “transferral”, a kind of reinvention that leaves the original source undiminished. Like the leaf shadows that appear on pavements at this time of year these images are a perpetuation of life in new guises.

Shadow Catchers runs until 20^th February 2011 at the Victoria & Albert Museum.