The interesting thing I noticed about the 600 film is that it is an integral film, in that the chemcials are all contained within the photograph, as opposed to the peel-apart films I have been using previously in this project. Integral films do not expose the surface of the image in the same "naked" way that that peel-apart films do, in integral film the image is always separated from the viewer by a sheet of clear plastic. I felt that this reflected the relationship between the viewer and a display cabinet. I felt it also linked to the artist Arman, who would create collections or "accumulations" and place them in glass boxes called vitrines for exhibition, a more modern equivalent might perhaps be Damien Hirst's Tiger Shark, preserved in formaldehyde, behind a pain of glass. (both below)
I think the images I created, in some way, continue this tradition of preservation behind a transparent material. My subjects for this work were again, flowers at night. I feel that the transparent yet physical material establishes a certain distance between the viewer and the object. We see the image but we cannot touch it and the glass or plastic implies that we must never try to touch it, lest the preserved object break, crack or in some way become compromised by our involvement in its history. Once an object is preserved it is outside of history, up until that point it has existed freely in the world, changing with its environment, once it is taken out of that situation and placed behind glass it becomes valuable and completely unattainable. It becomes an object to view but never again to touch.
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