Before photography was an art, it was a science. Its inventors sought how best to “fix a shadow,” as they called it, and render the visible world permanently onto paper. Following in the lineage of the medium’s early pioneers, Brenton Hamilton is both alchemist and artist. He transforms elements into chemistry and sunlight into shadow to find the connective link between photography’s earliest fixed images and modern art-making. Hamilton, however, is not concerned with how the world appears. Instead, he constructs his photographs from still lifes, collage, and silhouettes. “I live in rooms full of objects and I photograph them.” He says, “The collection is the work and the work is the collection.” And he shares this collection with us in A Blue Idyll, the long-awaited monograph spanning his 30-year career.
Hamilton is enraptured by the origin of the medium and the story of photography. He has, in his own words, “ransacked art history” for imagery. There are references in his work to classical sculpture, English gardens, and the Hudson River School painters. He adds these elements using scissors, compositing and printing in analogue processes. Although he embraces antiquarian subjects and printing, the work is decidedly contemporary. His photographs are not mere documents like those of the medium’s pioneers, but authentic and original works of art in which each image is its own story. Along with the color blue, surrealist motifs appear throughout the pages. He recycles certain images again and again, reassembling and asserting new narratives. There are cutouts—negative spaces left with ragged edges. Their positive counterpart appears in later images as the figures move between the pages of the book.
Despite the book’s title, not every image included is rendered in blue. Multi-colored gum bichromates, black-and-white platinum and palladium prints, along with other processes, accompany the many blue-hued cyanotypes. For him, blue represents more than a color, embodying an idea, an emotion, and a philosophy. He says his relationship with blue is “endlessness, opaque, infinite. It fuels me. I need that and I go to it as a motif repeatedly.”
The book is made with the same care as the photographs it contains. Silvery endpapers house large, luminous images on heavyweight paper. It is full of wonderous pictures that are often quiet with subdued colors and elegant compositions, but large in scale and takes up considerable space on the bookshelf. The vibrant blue spine with silvery lettering assumes its place amongst the volumes of art history, as it should.
A Blue Idyll, Cyanotypes and Dreams
Brenton Hamilton
Schilt Publishing, 2020
112 pp., 93 illustrations
12 x 9.5 in., €50