Gail Fischer
Our Disappearing Planet, 2021, Photo transfer on Yupo paper, Courtesy of the Artist.
Hear from the Artist
Transcript
Hi everyone and welcome to the Newport Art Museum’s NE Biennial 2022. My name is Gail Fischer and you are viewing two of my favorite images from the “Disappearing Planet Series”.
This series of images unites alternative process photography with infrared color. In Massachusetts where I live, every winter and spring I hike across the frozen paths at Crane Beach to visit the dunes for a check up on their erosion status, with a critical eye towards the environment, and to photograph the plant life. Sometimes I even get to see a Snowy Owl!
In 2020, I took a photo transfer workshop and discovered a process similar to the old Polaroid transfers I used to love making years ago. The process allows me to make transparent imagery with edges that can be shaped, molded, and crinkled. This photo technique has left me so excited with the results, since it enables me to express photographically a planet in distress through a printing process. I have tried other printing methods but this allows me to tear, manipulate, shrink, and place the image on multiple surfaces like; wood, paper, glass, and metals. These two images are printed on yupo paper.
I use a dedicated infrared camera to make my images because it gives you interesting and sometimes odd colors, along with beautiful clouds and skies in all weather.
What infrared is recording is heat and the chlorophyll in the leaves and foliage-which reflects the IR. I use that camera all winter long.
The Red Path was the first image I took last winter on a very cloudy day and it symbolizes my journey down the environmental photography path. The Yellow dunes image was taken a few weeks later in March when the blossoms were coming
out on the dune foliage. This day was bright and the sky held puffy clouds. This image is very upbeat and happy but by using the transfer medium one can imagine how our beautiful earth is eroding.
Using the photo transfer materials -coupled with the infrared camera, I believe I achieved the perfect combination of processes to emphasize that our earth is in decline.
I equate these images to: “Fragile fabrics blowing in the wind.”
Hope you enjoy my work. Thank you.