Etiolai

Samuel Partal

I view my practice as operating within a tradition of landscape photography — making photographs in the bits of wildness that bleed through the margins of the built environment — spaces in varying degrees of preservation and abandonment, ruin and remediation. I am interested in encountering the many transfigurations of the natural at play, in the uncanny landscapes of the anthropocene, or current geological age. In the studio, I set my film negatives on mounts and paint them with solutions of earth’s metals and mineral salts, sometimes letting them steep in the brine for days or weeks. These materials were central to the earliest photographic processes. They are also substances entangled in the diverse metabolisms of soil and sea, as well as agriculture and heavy industry. The commingling of these chemistries, the accretions and erosions that form their own miniature landscapes on and under the surface of the image, speak to the material and ecological history of photographs, and of the worlds they inhabit.

Artist Bios

Samuel Partal

Samuel Partal makes photographs of the post-natural landscape. He lives and works in Staten Island, New York.

Organizations

The Alice Austen House

A vibrant cultural center, the Alice Austen House keeps the bold spirit of the early American photographer alive by presenting changing exhibitions of Austen’s pioneering historic photographs and of contemporary photography, providing education programs for students, offering a range of cultural programs for the public.