Casting Shadows - Viky Garden

Viky Garden is best known as a painter, however last year she entered two photographic images into the international Julia Margaret Cameron 12th annual Photographic Award in Barcelona, Spain.

Out of over 6,000 entries from all over the world, both images won the Alternative Processes Award. The two works came from Casting Shadows, a series of pinhole photographs created in 2018.

Recognising through social media that everyone is now a photographer, Viky remembers wondering how far back she could take photography for it to interest and have value to her.

“As a painter, I am very aware of how a painting can, when the going’s good, invent itself. It develops outside of anything I’m doing to encourage it – often in spite of what I’m trying to do. So it is with photography. I love the mysterious revealing or developing aspect and it's this that feels lacking in the digital picture-taking process.

Pinhole photography is very much hands-on and really does create a kind of spirit. For me, it’s photography born of a cardboard box with no lens that I can look through to check the subject, only a pinhole to let light in onto a paper negative, where the exposure time is guesswork and frankly, anything can and does actually happen.

Because Casting Shadows are indoor poses, the exposures were up to 14 minutes long. This meant sitting as still as a statue, shallow breathing because even the rib cage moving created a blur. As I sat there, I had little idea what the camera was choosing to focus on but hoped serendipity graced herself and bestowed an exquisite result. Yes, it’s very much like a lottery. It’s about inviting chance into a process and respecting that very little will ever go to plan.

The resulting images have a recognisable idiosyncratic aesthetic. They are an analogue image as opposed to something digital. They are time and light crafted.”