personal study:
“The journey to the sea is filled with anticipation. The moon is bright and almost full, the sky is clear, and the wind has calmed.”
Introduction:
The main focus of my essay will be about Susan Derges. "The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera". I will be exploring how she takes camera less photos. I am planning on making photograms on natural form this may include flowers, leaf, plants ect. My project will explore the properties of natural forms and I will do this by using mainly the darkroom as well as I will as use camera less photography. For my project the person who I will be mainly focusing on will be Susan Derges and in her investigation of camera less photography.  In the title of this essay are the things, I believe, that Susan Derges has used to symbolise herself in the succession of photographs she has made over the last twenty years. The list is in no particular order - just the one I remember them in - and it could go on: the artist as a surging ocean wave; the artist as a water-droplet frozen in mid flight; the artist as a hive of bees; as a cluster of spawn; as a distilled liquid; an alembic; a flame - and now, in this body of new work - the artist as a stilled consciousness gazing out from within a ‘womb’.
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​Nowadays I begin thinking about all art by assuming, in this way, that I am seeing a self-symbol. I look at it as happening like this: in the creation of the work I consider the rectangle of the photograph, canvas or video screen, to be a symbolic arena in which ideals of the self are displayed or urged. The process appears to be that the artist invents, or selects a set of ground rules of a personal art-making ‘game’. The rules of this game, the rules of engagement with the materials in the symbolic arena, stand for either the total self of the artist, or the ideal total self of the artist - its nature and ideal mode of being in the world. All the actions conducted, and all the choices made within that rectangle are paradigmatic of that self. The artist may be either conscious, or unconscious of the symbolisation.
By the light of the silvery moon:
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The form of derges work is that Derges puts photogenic paper into rivers at night and records the water and the life within it she superimposes a photographic image of the man. Derges is best known for her pioneering techniques of capturing the movement of water by immersing photographic paper directly into the rivers or shorelines. Derges work is that she uses one of the simplest forms of photography processes and this is what you call photograms. Derges does not use the darkroom to create here photograms but instead she uses landscape. Derges work is different its taken in the dark and uses moonlight and is shown as peaceful and quite. You can clearly see in her work by the light of the silverly moon the contract of the moon behind the water droplets and how relaxing, smoothing, and happy the mood is.
this series by susan derges is from the full moon series 2003, the light of the silverly moon written in 1909. The music in the series is written by Gus Edward Madden.
Water forms:
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The journey to the sea is filled with anticipation.  The moon is bright and almost full, the sky is clear, and the wind has calmed.  The waves, not yet in sight, can be heard crashing on the shore.  Susan Derges pictures in her mind’s eye a delicate image that might come from this night’s work.  She carries the large sheet of photographic paper across the beach in its light tight box.  By the light of the moon, and the warmer emanations from shoreline towns, she observes the rhythm of the waves.  Each waves creates a different pattern outlined in the moonlight by the foam of water. A cluster of forceful waves crashes quickly, followed by a sequence of more gentle, undulating forms.  The sense of time passing quickly and of chaotic force at play is overwhelming.  Derges removes the paper from its casing and rapidly positions it on the sand.  Her hands are immersed in the cold water, holding the paper to the shore as it becomes a participant in the tidal flux.  Two waves wash over the paper; she releases a flashlight as the third wave encroaches.  The scene is illuminated for a millisecond and the event fixed: the alchemy of darkness, light and water.
By working at night, Derges extends the notion of the photographic darkroom into the ever-changing landscape.  The water flow of the sea and the river becomes a strip of film from which she selects.  Part of her journey is to find the sites of the water’s different rhythms and states.  The photographic metaphor has a deeper resonance with the character of water, as the liquid becomes the transparency that holds the record of its sensitive momentum.  It reverberates with the pulse of time and space and carries the language of this in its motion.  Each step into the river to the site of the work must be tentative and alive to the unpredictability of the compact flow. The photographic paper is carefully manoeuvred into position between the low tree branches and the wet boulders.  They create vortices and wave patterns that are carried downstream like memory traces of past events.  Similarly, the sand dragging across the paper of the sea prints expresses the receding force of past waves, the colour of each grain of sand determined by the length of its stasis on the exposed paper.  On a cloudy night, the artificial light of nearby towns is refracted onto the photographic paper and casts magenta hues.  All these intricate and random elements are suspended in the neutral space of the photographic paper.
Seed constellation:
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At the beginning of lockdown, Susan Derges was caught in the middle of moving home and studio to a new location. I managed the domestic part but the studio and all its equipment remain packed away, until the removals company are able to clear their backlog. Susan Derges felt ungrounded, in an unfamiliar place, and without a regular daily work routine to distract me from the impending global storm, as we all suspended out Type to enter text normal lives and hunkered down into our separate ‘bubbles’. The sense of isolation and distance was intense, so with no project on the go and initially as a distraction, Susan Derges turned to food and thoughts about how Susan Derges could make something good to enhance the boring weekly essentials shop. Susan Derges decided to prepare for growing something edible both in and outdoors.
