Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky: Photograms Portfolio

Swiss photographer Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky cites Anna Atkins’s nineteenth-century cyanotypes, Karl Blossfeldt’s 1930s studies of plants, and Max Ernst’s Histoire Naturelle (Natural history, 1926) as points of inspiration. Her new series of photograms continues the artist’s ongoing investigations into nature, beginning here with perforated leaves selected for their “found compositions”—the result of having been chewed by caterpillars. The leaves are then used as “negatives,” and color is added or subtracted with the aid of filters. To make the images in this limited-edition portfolio, Kovacovsky exposed each print seven times, changing the filters to seven different color settings and moving the paper between each exposure. Each set of prints is therefore unique, though all of the images feature seven exposures in the same set of colors. The resulting images, born out of darkroom chance and experimentation, are abstractions reminiscent of bright pigment on paper, camouflage, and at times a vibrant Rorschach test. In this work, the rigor of taxonomy is sacrificed in favor of elemental darkroom alchemy that transforms the original found compositions into disorienting, beautiful, and at times psychedelic impressions that have their origins in a real-world now far removed.