Christine Lorenz

Statements

I photograph salt crystals and disposable plastics as a way of connecting with the nonhuman world over time. The tools of macro photography serve to shift perspectives on the common materials of our everyday lives. The pieces that result can create moments of surprise and reflection that reorient our sense of place in the environment.

Halophilic series

Salt and plastics are everywhere on earth that humans are, as well as most places where we aren’t. The Halophilic series began with an interest in how far removed our experience of salt is from its presence as an earthly mineral. Both materials are so abundant that they tend to escape notice; both trace their roots to deep within the earth, although we’re unlikely to think of them that way; and both have peculiar abilities to seem to appear and disappear of their own volition. The Halophilic photographs and collages bring salt and plastics into the same visual space.

In geology, the term “halophilic” describes elements of salt-dependent ecosystems, and salt formations are often indicators of petroleum in the earth. In our time, both salt and plastic are everywhere humans are, and most of the places where we are not. As familiar and close at hand as salt is, imagery of it abounds in cultural expression, from the enigmatic to the mundane. Plastics have become as inevitable as salt, and nowhere near as benign. What kind of poetics do we have for a world that is infused with plastics at every level? What kind of stories could possibly fit the world we’re creating now? 

Read an in-depth article about the Halophilic photographs at Refract Journal 

Halophilic 4: By the Spell of the Invention

Objects the most minute are obtained,—.the delicate hairs on the leaves of plants,—the most minute and tiny bivalve calyx,—nay, even a shadow, the emblem of all that is most fleeting in this world, is fettered by the spell of the invention, and remains perfect and permanent long after it has been given back to the sunbeam which produced it; in short,to use Mr. Talbot’s own words, the picture is “ended as soon as begun.”

“The New Art",” from the proceedings of the Royal Society, 1839

Plastics have extended our human abilities in countless ways: for just one example, the vision made possible by contact lenses is simply routine. My sense of being in the world is structured by plastics, as it is by photography. The salt prints in this series are made with the same chemistry as the first positive/negative photographs in 1839, at the dawn of the industrial era. Photography originated in a world of lenses and chemicals, salt and paper, experimentation and new possibilities. Almost two hundred years later, our everyday lives are enmeshed with images, as they are with the avalanche of industrial products that trace their origins back to that moment. We are only beginning to grasp the long-term consequences of this evolution in human perception.

Halophilic 3: Also, There Was No More Sea

Like many Americans, I grew up surrounded by language of apocalypse. As the Book of Revelations draws to a close, John writes:

Now I saw a new heavens and a new earth, for the first heavens and the first earth had passed away. Also there was no more sea. (NKJ)

When the knot grows bigger the more you try to untangle it, isn’t it natural to imagine that it could just all be cut off ? We’ve known for some time now that the plastics we’re making aren’t disappearing. We know they’re choking the life out of our oceans. Everyone knows about the Pacific garbage patch; we’ve all heard about how plastics have filtered through every level of the oceans’ food chains; we know they’re never going away and are accumulating at a pace that grows by the day. How do we live with this?  Is there some relief in the idea that some kind of a cataclysmic end is approaching—a real end, something so big  and so final that, in retrospect, we couldn’t really have been expected to do anything about it?

Halophilic 2: On a Molecular Level

These photographs are part of a project that looks at salt and plastics up close, through methods that dodge some of the limits of human perception. The photographs depict salt crystals, illuminated with polarized light, which is filtered through layers of transparent, disposable plastics. Wildly unpredictable colors result  from the way plastics behave as retarders to the polarized light, and sometimes patterns become visible within the plastics themselves. In the process, salt and plastic collaborate in refraction, creating shimmering, gravity-defying fields that seem to escape our sense of scale.

We know salt to be a material of the earth; as petroleum products, plastics are also an end-product of industrial-scale extraction. These materials are part of our world at every level, from the geological to the the  most minuscule we can imagine. The exploitative practices that created the modern era have left a ravaged earth where “forever chemicals” suffuse the water and the air. Salt and plastics intermingle and pass through our bodies all day long.  We are both culturally and materially enmeshed with these substances, independently of our ability to sense them.

Read more about the Lenticular series (Halophilic 2.2 Fun Size)

Halophilic 1: As Below, So Above

An experience of salt is usually not a geological experience. Most salt that we see has been processed, packaged, branded and streamlined into our consumer logistics system in such a way that we have no way of knowing where it came from. In this respect, salt is a lot like plastic: endlessly mutable, endlessly abundant, and to all appearances groundless.

We think of salt in terms of its flavor, or how it can preserve things; the way it flows through our bodies, surfacing on our skin, or at times pouring from our eyes. When it comes to what humans do with salt on the earth, though, only a small fraction of it goes to food. The largest part of salt production goes to clearing the roads. Petroleum and salt are interlocked there again: our transportation system literally depends on it to get things where they need to go. The next largest end use of salt is for chemical production, particularly chlorine. The products can go anywhere, and plastics can look like anything. In the life cycle of salt in the earth, any little trace of it is about as likely to end up in some form of plastic as it is likely to pass through a human body and surface as a little drop on the skin.

Salt

We tasted salt before we could name it, and it’s been cycling through our bodies ever since. It’s so universally familiar that we speak of boring things in general as common as table salt, and most of the time we’re unlikely to think of it as something from the earth. The systems of industry and commerce that bring consumable salt to our daily lives have liberated it from its origins: we can have no idea whether it was evaporated on islands in the Caribbean or mined from beneath Lake Erie. In its purified form, it’s both commonplace and essential, and its familiar ways of dissolving in water and appearing again can make it feel like it has a life of its own. Leave it alone, and eventually it will reassemble itself. It crystallizes in structures that reflect its changing circumstances.

Over time, we’ve found countless roles for salt in our languages, in poetry, alchemical lore, and everyday figures of speech. People who dwell on an offense are salty; we can salt the earth of our enemies. In the age of alchemy, salt was seen as an element born of fire, and described it as a bridge from bitterness to wisdom. We see our own human qualities in its ebbs and flows, in states that are always subject to change.

Download portfolio of Salt photographs

Read more about the Dissolution series

Folds

When crystals appear and grow in their solution, they seem to act independently, with a logic of their own. A photograph captures them in a temporary state, and puts a boundary around them. When we’re looking at photographs, the more we’re involved with the image, the more we forget that we’re looking at paper. Folding a photograph lets that paper stage an interaction between the images on either side, which are just two of the ways that the crystals could have turned out, and might yet next time.

Plastics

Transparent plastic packaging is a material we’re likely to recognize immediately. Typically, we notice it only for as long as it resists being  opened, or crackles as it refuses to crush down in the trash can. What would it mean to treat these pieces of plastic, not as a means of  transit for the things we want, but as things in themselves, existing in the world with us? These pieces have particular material character; on their own, they shape empty space, reflecting and diffusing light. Many many of them will be sitting around, somewhere, long after we ourselves are as forgotten as our purchases. It's possible that we could never grasp the scale of what any one of us, as a consumer, has  processed over a lifetime. In this sense, even the things we handle every day remain unseen.

The photograph of the plastic doesn’t lie: it shows what was in front of it. But neither does it tell the truth of what the material does, in the big picture. The the thing we’re holding doesn’t tell the truth either. The plastic we hold is a clean, innocent thing when we are holding it. There is nothing in what we touch briefly and throw away to suggest where it came from, or where it went—nothing could seem further from the extraction system of the petroleum industry, or from the muck of an endless landfill, let alone the gradual breakdown and irreversible dispersal that happens in the earth’s waterways. These photographs approach the material from an angle of its appeal—not what’s wrong with it, but the qualities that seem so magical about it—and the illusion of its disappearance is a deeper part of what we seem to value about it. An act of noticing can become an interruption in the flow of consuming and disposing in our daily lives.

Where Facilities Exist

I photograph shape-shifting things that appear to disappear. This has brought me to spend a lot of time looking at disposable plastics. If we’ve had the experience of prying apart the packaging shells of toys and electronics, or seen a dirty, feather-light grocery bag tangled in a tree—and who hasn’t?—we have a sense of just how resilient these materials are. They serve their purpose, we handle them for a moment; afterward, eventually, they’re out there in the world somewhere. In some form, they continue to exist. The act of photographing things lets them linger in human perception a moment longer, but the existence of things in the world extends far beyond what we can observe, control, or even grasp.