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The Colour Carbon – Ellie Young – May July 2016

Ellie Young
Ellie Young

The Colour Carbon Exhibition runs 18th May to 10th July 2016

Opening event Sunday 22nd May 2pm to 5 pm. 

Offical opening speech at 2.30 pm by Adjunct Professor Gale Spring

Like woven tapestries and fragile church windows – a blur between the realms of reality and fantasy. These photographs reveal concealed beauty of texture structure and colour. These intimate portraits of creatures of the natural world invite the viewer to see what is often unobserved. Delicate, fragile, caught in a fleeting moment of Ellie’s shutter, they achieve immortality in the permanence of the colour carbon photograph. Ellie chose this process for the surface relief making the wing structures appear sculptural.

Since 1840 insect wings have been photographed “a bit of magic realized” Talbot 1840.

Ellie Young
Ellie Young

The carbon process, initially a black-and-white process using lampblack (carbon black), was invented by Alphonse Poitevin in 1855. The process was later adapted to color, through the use of pigments, by Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron in 1868.

Carbon photographs were the preferred process of the top echelon of commercial photographers in the 2nd half of the 19th century. Commercial printing houses of this time showed that carbon photographs were up to three times more expensive than even platinum.

The relief accentuates sharpness giving a three-dimensional quality. The archival quality makes it the most stable of all photographic processes.