![]() In its simplest form, lumen involves placing objects on photosensitive paper (like what we use for darkroom printing) and exposing it to sunlight for a few hours to create an image (here is a more detailed guide, if you’re interested). Photograms have a long history, and illustrious practitioners including Anna Atkins, Man Ray and Pablo Picasso. The term “lumen” was popularised by Jerry Burchfield, but it is essentially a type of photogram – a camera-less photographic image, made by placing objects directly on a photosensitive substrate. Lockdown Lumen focuses on one such alternative process – lumen prints. Descriptions and instructions for all the processes mentioned above, and many more, are available on, which, incidentally, spawned the aforementioned Facebook group. Alternative processes range from virtually costless kitchen-counter methods (anthotypes made with beetroot juice, albumen prints made with egg-whites) to deluxe materials (glass plates coated with platinum or gold) from relatively common processes (cyanotype, mainstream by alt proc standards) to rare and esoteric ones (Mordançage) from historic (daguerreotype, invented in the 1830s) to modern (Polaroid lifts and inkjet transfers). It includes a vast range of processes, but what they have in common is that they are all photographic, that is, they involve “drawing with light”. Alt proc is an umbrella term with no universally-agreed definition. The Lockdown Lumen project was conceived on a Facebook group for alternative photographic processes (alt proc, for short). The remaining six will appear in Part 2, to be published next Sunday. Using the medium of lumen, an alternative process which involveps printing with sunlight, we explore themes of self-isolation and home-boundedness – both through the subject-matter (home-brewed beer, a Skype call with family…) and through the materials themselves (the prints were made using objects and light found in or around the home). ![]() Lockdown Lumen is a collaborative project by 12 artists in 8 different countries in various stages of COVID-19 lockdown. ![]()
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