Using up to 1,000 multiple exposures, Finnish photographer Niko Luoma (born 1970) applies individual elements of color and form to the negative, layer by layer. Meticulous calculations and geometrical skills are the necessary foundation for this; the results are abstract photographs of exceptional chromatic intensity and luminosity.
For Each Minute, Sixty-Five Seconds is based on the series Adaptions, which reproduces famous works by other artists. Luoma—well known for his previous Hatje Cantz collection, And Time Is No Longer an Obstacle (2012)—offers a fascinating visual interplay between the compositional qualities of the photograph and its reverence toward Bacon, Hockney, Van Gogh and Picasso. With tongue in cheek, Luoma thus humorously realizes the avant-garde’s aspiration to liberate photography from the obligation to faithfully reproduce reality, allowing it to become an art.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Foreword by Timothy Persons. Text by Daniel Marzona, Lyle Rexer.
“My material is light,” says Helsinki School photographer Niko Luoma (born 1970), and “my process is a combination of ... calculation and chance.” Inspired by mathematics and geometry, and elaborating on the rich tradition begun by August Strindberg’s celestographs, Luoma creates elaborate and marvelously evocative photographic abstractions, in compositions of lines and geometric shapes. His methods are purely and emphatically analog: light-sensitive materials repeatedly exposed to light. The delicate crosshatched networks of lines in his series Symmetrium, for example, were built up through thousands of exposures on a single negative. Working thus, Luoma’s approach may said to be both accretive and chance-based, for the composition of the final image, as a collaboration with light itself, is wholly unpredictable. This volume compiles works from the past decade.
Niko Luoma: And Time Is No Longer an Obstacle