Limited-edition Photograph by Michael Flomen

“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

Aperture is pleased to release this special limited-edition photograph by artist Michael Flomen. Flomen’s work was featured in the publication The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (Aperture, 2009) by Lyle Rexer. Rexer 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.” For the past fifteen years, this self-taught artist has continued to collaborate with nature using his camera-less technique. Natural phenomena are the inspiration for his picture-making.

>Visit Flomen's website

>View The Edge of Vision traveling exhibition