Genevieve Maynard Photography
Various cross-continental adventures in photography - long term projects and one-off observations
All images © Genevieve Maynard
Aedicule: a tension so exact that it is peace
Notes from the Locanda Leonardo Lavello exhibition, May 4 - 23, 2024
When I met artistic director Raouf Gharbia last year to discuss the possibility of this show he asked two questions that have given me considerable pause. Firstly, how could I persuade Italians to come and see a show comprised of images of edicole sacre which they walk past every day without really considering them? And secondly, ‘why’, he asked, ‘have you printed some of them using the cyanotype process when the colour images are so beautiful?’.
The exhibition features a selection of images from an ongoing series entitled ‘Aedicule’ which I started in 2022 when I happened across an aedicula, or 'edicole sacre', in the hills above Olcio that held my attention. I have printed them using two methods; the first is full colour digital inkjet, and the second utilises two historical hand-printing processes, cyanotype and Van Dyke brown.
Left to right: 'Stripey shirts', cyanotype; 'Venezia 7', digital inkjet; 'Mysterious signs', Van Dyke Brown; Genevieve Maynard, 2022 - 24
There is a direct link between Lake Como, the invention of photography, and historical print processes. The story involves three people who were central to those early experiments – Henry Fox Talbot, a gentleman scientist, and his two friends, Sir John Herschell who invented the cyanotype formula, and Anna Atkins who used this new technology in a published format.
It was while honeymooning here in 1833 with his talented watercolourist wife, Constance, that Henry Fox Talbot found himself disillusioned with his own artistic endeavours. He had been using a camera lucida - a simple draftsman’s tool using a prism of glass attached to a metal arm - to refract light from the landscape onto his drawing pad. All he had to do was trace the resulting image in its projected form, and yet, he wrote, once he had removed his eye from the prism and inspected the results on his pad he, ‘found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold’.
Left to right: 'View towards Lecco', camera lucida drawing, Henry Fox Talbot,1833; 'Villa Melzi', camera lucida drawing, Henry Fox Talbot,1833; 'View towards Bellagio, Lago di Como', cyanotype, Genevieve Maynard, 2019
On his return to England he devoted himself to pursuing a way to fix, or make permanent, the image formed by refracting light onto a surface. In this endeavour he had help from his friend and fellow scientist, Sir John Herschell, who suggested part of the solution to his problem, but alas, the print process that Henry invented, the calotype, proved to be frustratingly impermanent.
Sir John, however, went on to invent the cyanotype and Van Dyke brown processes in 1842. Their close friend, the photographer and botanist Anna Atkins, used the cyanotype process to produce the first book to use photography as an illustration technique with Herschell’s new process. Atkins’ work is celebrated in the historical process community, and nearly two hundred years post-publication her original botanical cyanotype photograms retain their detail and deep and permanent colour.
So how does one make a cyanotype and why is it blue?
Above: cyanotype photograms from 'Photographs of British Algae', Anna Atkins, 1843 (Natural History Museum, UK)
The process uses two chemicals which, when mixed together and exposed to UV rays, create a deep Prussian blue. Different historical processes use different chemicals and can produce different base colours such as the warm brown tones of the Van Dyke brown process. The prints are made by hand, sandwiching a digital negative against the sensitised paper in a contact printing frame, and then exposing it to UV rays before developing in water.
Making these hand-printed images can be challenging. They’re subject to change quite dramatically if one does not have good printing discipline. There can be differences between each print, even when using the same negative. There may be unintentional differences in tone, saturation or depth or colour, or there may be a deliberate variance between prints depending on each artist’s practice. It becomes an exercise in wabi sabi, the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection.
On a good working day, and assuming everything goes well, I can perhaps produce 8 - 10 images. It is labour intensive and each print is unique. It is slow photography.
Left to right: 'Chiaroscuro'; 'Surveillance'; 'Napoli 14, skull fingers'; 'Tabacchi';'Stripey shirts'; cyanotype and Van Dyke brown prints, Genevieve Maynard 2023- 24
I am drawn to hand-printing my digital images because I have always been interested in the intersection of digital and analogue technologies. That said, not every full colour digital image is successful as a monotone historical print.
For photographers in the 1970s, making the shift from monotone black and white photography to colour photography involved coming to terms with a whole new set of aesthetic criteria. For many of them colour was a very distracting new concept to be grappled with. This may seem strange to us now, as we are bombarded with colour images and so used to seeing them. Most of us are still familiar with black and white images, but how do brown and white or blue and white images change the way we see or react to them?
Monotone treatment of colour photos can focus the gaze on the details: the composition, the framing, and the elements that the photographer has chosen to include. However, the very blue blue of the cyanotype doesn’t just make me view the compositional elements of the image in a different way; it also gives me a different emotional reaction.
Above; details of cyanotype and Van Dyke brown prints, Genevieve Maynard 2023- 24
So by choosing to hand-print using an historical print process I am working backwards, away from the distracting beauty of full colour and unwavering precision of digital photography and inkjet printing. I allow myself the luxury of exploring a different way of experiencing the same image. I hope people who see these works have a similar encounter.
Left to right: ' Venezia 8'; 'Napoli 3'; 'Venezia 5'; 'Firenze 1'; 'Venezia 4'; Genevieve Maynard 2022- 23
And now I’d like to address Raouf’s other question – why should Italians, or indeed anyone, come to see a collection of photographs of everyday objects, things so common they often go unnoticed?
While the promise of seeing such objects in a new way through a hand-made monotone historical print might be reason enough for some to come to this exhibit, for others it might not. As I thought about this,I started to examine what it was that had compelled me to take in excess, so far, of one thousand images of aedicule. Surely twenty or thirty would have sufficed for simple curiosity.
I found a passage written in 1984 by Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri, seemingly specifically for me to find:
‘ I believe that (the) work should be looked upon as a kind of ‘archaeology’, rather than imagery buried in the recesses of our memory and endowed with totalising values. I’m alluding to archaeology not because the elements, objects or spaces are dated … but rather because I regard archaeology as a means of deduction through which to discover things. Archaeology as a science which sets out to describe, reveal, and bring the past into the light of the present. (The) photographs ... are exploratory gazes into the unknown … above all (the) priority is to employ a gaze that unambiguously strives to uncover things that are buried or hidden … the photographs are dialectic nodes, hieroglyphics that demand a long close examination in order to be deciphered.’ (1)
I had realised quite quickly that the photos I was taking of these aedicule were more than just images of interesting objects that were not part of my cultural upbringing. They were, and are, my attempts to decipher the objects I was pointing my lens at. Rather than simply creating a collection to serve as a photographic record of all the aedicule I encountered on my travels, I wanted to understand them at a different level. I wanted to dig into their deeper layers and uncover their complexity, their raison d’etre.
Left to right: ' Napoli 7'; 'Orvieto 1; 'Napoli 6'; 'Mandello del Lario 1'; 'Napoli 4'; Genevieve Maynard 2022- 23
What are aedicule? At base, obviously, they are shrines, but I see them as a montage of family, community, history, belief, and culture, and the day to day, all in one. As Ghirri says in another essay, ‘...some objects seem to be particularly well-suited to absorbing memories.’(2)
In any image I consider ‘successful’ there are multiple points of interest. Often they are unexpected details that catch our eye and pull us into the photograph, leading us down that trail of absorbed memories. These points are not necessarily of artisanal triumphs or outstanding beauty; in fact sometimes they are uncomfortable, even distressing – a discarded face mask littering a vico, a photo of a small child with a fresh candle beside it, a tangle of tape and electrical cables drilled roughly into a centuries old wall, or the evidence of years of acque alte below the frame of a shrine in Venice.
Left to right: ' Mandello del Lario 3; 'Girasole'; 'Twilight'; 'Chiaroscuro'; 'Napoli 5'; Genevieve Maynard 2022 - 24
I had decided early on that all the elements one might consider extraneous to the subject – the air-conditioning units, plumbing, a pail of brooms and mops, graffiti – were equally as important, not just as ‘archaeological’ evidence to help me understand my subject, but because of something that should be at the foundation of a successful photo: form. And so this is also why those sometimes disturbing elements are included.
When all elements balance in the composition within the artificial boundary of the frame of the camera there is a deep sense of rightness. Sometimes this meant making a stylistic choice not to place the aedicula front and centre. As Robert Adams writes, and from him I have borrowed the title of this exhibition:
‘...a photographer wants form, an unarguably right relationship of shapes, a visual stability in which all components are equally important. The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace’. (3)
Thank you for reading, and I hope that my responses to Raouf’s two thought-provoking questions have not only answered them, but given you, and other viewers, a new way of looking at edicole sacre.
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