Thanks for your response.

It seems to me that the best times on A&P come when people engage in discussions of each other’s art in the making. The civil and genuine tone employed is a tribute to the founders of this site and to be fostered.

Unlike some artists, for better or worse, I am willing to throw sometimes half-formed things out for reaction. Probably premature in this case, not because I’m too likely to be influenced by others, but because I hadn’t done enough work to provide good fodder for comment. I will be working more on this series, you haven’t seen the last of them…

David, I’ve never used infrared film, but could simulate its effect digitally. It wouldn’t make much difference in the rock, but would make the bit of vegetation lighter in the original, hence darker in the negative, which I think would be good.

June, thanks for the X-ray comment, it means I haven’t got things right yet, I want these rocks to appear as solid objects, not ghostly traces. I do have a hook for you, which I’ll get to in time. Just a little hint: it came up in your own recent post. Not trying to be coy, it’s just that the idea is worth presenting properly.

Darned if Ribs doesn’t take me back. I hark from a time when the fruits of American enterprise were heroically displayed. One of my favorites was a mural, perhaps at the local train station, of locomotives writ large, poking out at the viewer from their respective tracks. Leading the pack was a GG1, designed by Raymond Loewy (or Lowey, depending upon your source of info) looming like a blunt and motive sphinx. There’s something about your shot that makes me think that, with a little patience on your part, the formation will make its way to where you are standing.

Have you ever tried infrared? You can get film for a regular camera, or have a digital sensor converted. Gives a feeling somewhere between the positives and negs.

The first image in your post had me going for awhile. It sure looked like a negative, but it had for me a spectral quality suggesting that you had come upon a massive outcropping of radium. That, or you had strategically positioned lights among the rocks. My eye, however,kept going back to the shapes at the bottom of the image and how they had a definite black/white reversal about them. Then I read on.

The balanced rock keeps casting its spell even though I now know. It’s almost like one of those diagrams where one moment it’s a vase and the next two facing human profiles.

I’m kinda new in these parts and somewhat chary about dispensing advice, but I have one comment about those shapes at the bottom. What if they were dodged black so as to create a kind of screen over which the spectral shapes would float. For some reason I’m thinking “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” where the space ship looms in all its glory over the dark shape of the Devil’s Postpile.

What I see in your negatives (inverted images) is disturbing, although not necessarily in a bad way.

I read them as x-rays, which is a kind of thrice removed from the reality of rock. It moves the rock/bones into the 2-d-ness of a thin transparent membrane (the film); it also makes them a human (if not necessarily soft) artifact rather than something set apart or alien. Or perhaps, alien in the way that contemporary medical tools are alien rather than in the way rocks can be alien.

I’m not sure I “like” the negatives (although I very much like the postivies). But that’s not to say I don’t respond to them.

Pure tonal design? hmmm, the photographic effect is of light (not a painterly white); so that changes my whole concept of tone. Unfortunately the second photo in particular makes me think of nuclear irradiated structures.

I see a buddha in one of the weathered rockfaces in the second positive photo. And certainly the first could be a kind of portrait. But I can’t imagine color on the negatives — Sunil is a good choice of advisors, as his colors resonate like the negatives do.

I obviously am not against humanizing or anthropomorphizing the earth structures, but the light is almost too weird for me. Maybe if I had some kind of analytic hook to hang on to…..

Yes, the tonality of the second selection is bad, I just didn’t have time to work on it before leaving. When I return, I’ll send you some possibilities that you may be interested in trying your treatment on.