Although photography has made it possible for us to see more "realistic" depictions of faraway
things and places, it has also, through its proliferation and technological ability to render
reality, extended this distance to the point that photography has become a substitute for "real" experience. Such loss is tragic and contributes to the abuse of what has been traditionally called "natural resources." I seek real experience and try to make work that connects directly with natural energies. —Jerry Burchfield

Jerry Burchfield’s Primal Images emerge unmediated by camera or lens directly from the teeming Amazon. The strategy of the cameraless image allows Burchfield to bypass not only photographic evidence but also the myriad political constructions of tropical nature that define the Amazon: its heroic myths, histrionic environmental conflicts, human and natural histories, and hybrid cultures. Rather than scientific description or environmental polemic, Burchfield's lumen prints confront us with the visual representation of the Amazon’s most elemental truth: natural process.

Burchfield's process and botanical content derive from many previous photographic explorations. Its most obvious source in both its visual form and its nascent scientific aspirations is photography's earliest cameraless printing-out paper images of the late 1830s, especially Fox Talbot’s and Anna Atkins' photogenic drawings formed by the action of light on sensitized paper on which botanical specimens and delicate objects such as lace had been placed. Talbot’s photographic material had traces of delicate coloration due to the chemical nature of his hand-made emulsion. Burchfield creates his contemporary shadowgrams, which he has termed lumen prints, on outdated, black-and-white photo paper, pushing the chromatic aura to an extreme by exploiting the uncontrollable chemical staining and solarization qualities of the commercial material when it comes in contact with the residues of plant life and viscera.

Talbot's early photogenic drawing of plant specimens derive from the long history of botanical illustration that date back to prehistory. Illustrated flower books and herbal guides continue in our own time as one of the central visual motifs of popular culture. Even in high-art, the popular favorites of the last century range from Van Gogh's "Irises," through O'Keeffe’s "Calla Lillies," to Warhol's "Daisies." The systematic illustration of plant forms and the classification of botanical elements and medicinal uses has served as one of the cornerstones of modern scientific research. Botanical illustrations in every culture also reference theology as well as the medicinal and the practical. Indeed, botanical illustration has been the site of the co-mingling of the sacred and the secular, decorative art and practical knowledge.
It is these depictions of floral motifs with both actual and theological references that provide another precedent for the lumen prints.

The early 20th century Photo-Secessionists also provide a stylistic grounding for the lumen prints. Out of the bright, hot, colored humid air of the rainforest, Burchfield gives us back elegant pastels and mysterious glowing forms that emerge from darkness and fade into obscurity. What is captured is not the Amazon but rather a haunting luminosity of gesture, pattern, and sometimes graceful, sometimes chaotic form; an Amazonian equivalent of the Photo-Secessionists' belief in the ephemeral quality of light and the eternal beauty of the forest and nostalgia.

There is however, another way to interpret Burchfield’s imagery that transcends this romantic, environmental reading of the Amazon. The metaphorical photography first articulated in Alfred Stieglitz's "Equivalents" suggests a reading of the lumen prints in terms of symbol, ambiguity, private experience, abstraction: artifice rather than social or economic commentary. The romantic pictorial reading sees the visual through the eyes of the political environmental movement. A metaphorical reading of the lumen prints extracts each image from both its actual setting and its politics and advances the visual as a unique and personal interior drama. With this reading the Amazon becomes another, albeit extravagant, source of raw material, still-lifes, and artifacts: the botanical specimen itself ceases to be of primary importance. It functions outside the documentary imperative achieving its status only as symbol and vehicle for transformation.

The lumen prints are also predicated on chance operations, indeterminacy, and the anarchy of sun, wind, and weather. Burchfield's procedures necessarily dispense with the indexical notion of the photograph as document and substitute instead a generative process of uncontrollable transformation.
In the lumen prints rather than previsualization we have the accident, the gamble, the unexpected. This belief in the agency of chance and the uncontrollable visual discoveries of the photographic process, derives both from the metaphorical photographers and from another history that underwrites Burchfield’s Amazon work: experimental work in alternative process and cameraless images.

Alternative photographic recording and printing methods and materials have flourished on the sidelines of a "straight" photographic monoculture. Artists as diverse as Andy Warhol, Bea Nettles, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Robert Rauschenberg have used such processes as photograms, cameraless and pinhole images, fabricated negatives, chemical staining, solarization and posterization. Indeed since the beginning of photography artists have protested against a single "correct" process and aesthetic. Beyond the context of the Amazon, Burchfield's lumen prints are then an exploration of media and light sensitive material. But, more significantly, read within the context of the Amazon, Burchfield's investigation can now be seen as an exploration of the potency of the primeval. The lumen prints are primal images because they are derived from the primitiveness of the photographic process and produced by the direct impression of the forces of rainforest. They are primal in that the gestures and complexities created by the intersection of the specimens and the process owes little to the sophisticated, civilized eye of the artist and more to the agencies of rude, uncontrollable nature and chance.

The typical ecotourist photographer masters the Amazon by returning to civilization with docu-ments extracted from the rainforest by sophisticated imagemaking technologies that derive from mechanisms and processes contrived in another world. But Burchfield's lumen prints represent not human mastery over nature but rather a willingness to engage in the natural process. Their re-deeming grace is that they have allowed air, sunlight, rain and decay to recover the spirit of the place.

Jonathan Green
Excerpted from the essay "Beyond the Importance of Objects" forthcoming in Primal Images
co-published by Center for American Places and Laguna Wilderness Press

Image: Jerry Burchfield, Memora Moringiifolia, 2000