Michael Flomen: New Born, 2010

“This image was made in the spirit of all my recent work, that is, it was a collaboration with Nature. New Born, 2010, was made in a pond in Northern Vermont at night. The glass-plate negative was dipped into the water’s edge, creating the horizon line, exposing the elements and the water’s secrets, invisible to the naked eye. For me New Born is a photographic document of a fragment of evolution. The image represents the birth of a new beginning.”—Michael Flomen

Working without a camera, Michael Flomen places sheets of black-and-white photographic paper in snowfields, streams, and other natural settings to register the activity of light in relation to natural phenomena. This environmental romanticism, so closely akin to Talbot’s intuition that photography allows nature to draw itself, represents a new adaptation of the photogram.

Lyle Rexer, who writes of Flomen’s work in The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography, says that the artist “takes photography’s desire for the real to its literal extreme, making photographs that are in direct contact with the natural elements he seeks to capture."

Each limited-edition print is hand-packed with great care and ships from New York within 3–5 days.