Dear friends,

We inform you of the next activity that will take place on Friday, December 15 at 7:00 p.m. We invite you to come to the Biblioteca Esquerra de l’Eixample – Agustí Centelles for a guided tour of the Skiá – Graphé. The drawing of the shadow exhibition, framed within the Photointerpretations project. The visit will be led by Martí Llorens and Rebecca Mutell, authors of the exhibition.

As always, prior registration is required. If a partner wants to attend with a companion, he or she can register him or her on the form, but he or she will be on a waiting list. You will find in the attached document more information about the visit and the registration form you received in the mail.

The Greek words skiá, ‘shadow’, and graphé, ‘drawing’ – that is, the technique of drawing and representing objects through their shadow – were the terms W. H. F. Talbot chose in 1835 to designate the images that managed to fix on a paper sensitized with silver chloride. The sketch, then, represented the beginning of the photographic research of this renowned English polymath.

Following in the footsteps of Talbot’s photographic essays, Martí Llorens and Rebecca Mutell decided to portray the city of Girona using the ski graphic procedure. The technical nature of this procedure, in which the appearance of the image by direct blackening of the paper necessarily takes place in the same place where it is exposed to sunlight, means that the genesis of these photographs belongs entirely and unavoidable in this city. Given that the main subject of the sketches – which Talbot would later call photogenic drawings – were botanical specimens, and given the character of Girona’s parks and urban gardens, they chose to make a series of frames by contact of leaves and plants of some of these parks.
This same procedure was used as a negative for a large format camera. If 180 years ago Talbot had needed an exposure time of several minutes to make a frame, the fact of using that same paper inside a camera forced them to exposures that, in their case, they were not less than two hours in the middle of summer. As for the positivity, the symbiosis of a historical photographic procedure with a contemporary technique seemed fruitful to them. So they digitized the paper negatives so they could print them in a much larger format.