Shell (Monday Art Challenge Week 4)

Pernille Ørum's Monday Art Challenge offered "shell" as a prompt, and I decided to reach way back into my past for this one. Around 2002 (maybe earlier) I took a photography course and learned about photograms. It's where you expose photo paper directly, placing objects (or subjects) on or over the paper, making it an overall camera-less process, a la Stan Brakhage. I was very proud of this one piece I did that used a little bit of double-exposure trickery, cut-outs, and a sheet of overhead transparency to create an image of a hand that appeared to be flaking off, like one of those hard chocolate shells you pour out over ice cream. I didn't get a very good grade on it because photograms were considered "cheating" or somehow less valid a form of photography because the results are easier to control (their words, not mine), but I was still happy I gave my classmates a little brain teaser as they tried to reverse engineer my process.