This abstract, experimental work is a study on how to evoke depth on the flat surface of a photograph. It also investigates exposure processes on photographic paper and film.

I cut out forms out of cardboard, and colored them with crayons, paint, or oil pastels.

After arranging the cardboard forms the film is exposed several times, shifting the vantage point, in order to create a confusing image that plays a game of revealing and hiding. This additive approach blends bright colors into new warmer shades, changes the shapes and the feeling of dimension. The static sculptural shapes are also activated. The images become mysterious, we don’t really know what we’re looking at anymore.

All images are an interplay of control of the medium and provoking a number of accidental factors. I embrace chance, how the planes overlap is more or less controlled, but never really foreseen. The merging of the images is done in the exposure, not afterwards.

The photograms are also made using multiple exposures, the image thus created is quite unpredictable. What remains, what disappears? Some images fade away like a bygone memory. The images merge into a mysterious whole.

All images ©Rio Staelens