Lot
41
Untitled (Crunchtime 32)
Gelatin silver toned print, 2009
73 x 114 cm
Unique photogramme
Estimate
$5 800
This unique photogram is part of an ongoing series of camera-less photographs made with snow during the winter months in Quebec. I have been making photographs with snow for over twenty years.
The Crunchtime series began in 2008. The photographic paper is crunched and folded like a discarded manuscript before exposure. It is then rediscovered, placed in the winter landscape at night, and exposed to the snow, terrain, and the energies that culminate during the event. Crunchtime 32 is a rare small-format piece in the ongoing series.
I am interested in things that we do not see but know are there.
Biographical note
Michael Flomen was born in Montreal in 1952. He began taking photographs in the late 1960s, and has been showing his work on several continents since 1972. He has been a darkroom printer and collaborator for many artists including for Jacques Henri Lartigue’s travelling exhibition in Canada and the United States in the mid-1970s. Flomen’s first book of “street photographs,” which followed the Cartier Bresson formalism of photographic picture making, was published in 1980, followed by Still Life Draped Stone in 1985. Flomen switched camera formats in the early 1990s, photographing snow and producing works under the title RISING. For the last fifteen years, this self-taught artist has used camera-less techniques to collaborate with nature. Various forms of water, firefly light, wind, and other natural phenomena are the inspiration for his picture making. Michael Flomen’s work is in the collections of George Eastman House, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Norton Museum of Fine Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.