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 Michael Flomen's work was featured in the publication The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (Aperture, 2009) by Lyle Rexer, who writes of Flomen’s work 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." Working without a camera, he 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.

Gelatin-Silver Print
Paper Size: 23 15/16 x 19 7/8 inches
Image Size: 22 13/16 x 18 1/8 inches
Edition of 10
Signed and numbered by the artist

Michael Flomen (b. 1952, Montreal, Quebec) is a self-taught artist who has had extensive solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Canada, often collaborating with nature using his cameraless technique. He has served as a darkroom printer and collaborator for many artists, including Jacques Henri Lartigue. Flomen’s photographs are inspired by firefly light, wind, and other natural phenomena. His work is in the collections of George Eastman House; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec; the Norton Museum of Fine Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Canada; and the Whitney Museum of American Art; among others.