Amanda Marchand

The World is Astonishing with You in it: A 21st Century Field Guide to the Birds, Ferns and Wildflowers

These images are lumen photo collages from a larger, ongoing series "Lumen Notebook." In these sun-prints (and artist book by the same name), I look at our changing environment through the temporality of photography’s fugitive lumen process.

Lumen prints are made with black & white photo papers. In each paper is a distinct, yet latent, color alphabet. This work employs three vintage field guides that belonged to my mother – North American birds, ferns, and wildflowers. I mark/expose the photographic paper, making one mark per quadrant or half with an edge of the respective Field Guide book. Each photograph references an endangered or disappearing species (bird, fern, wildflower).

I have been making the work in nature, at different residencies, and my family's Canadian cabin where the birds and ferns and wildflowers abound. This is a personal meditation – as each paper shifts color, slowly or quickly, in the variegated light of the sun.

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