Thermograph

Published 2017, in conjunction with a one-person exhibition 

at Miller Yezerski Gallery, Boston MA

Softcover, 32 pages

Afterward by Richard Audobon

Price: $12 USD plus shipping

To purchase copies: email badenk@gmail.com

From the exhibition essay:

In 2016, Karl Baden unearthed a series of photographs he made in 1976, bringing to light another dimension of the many approaches characteristic of his work. 

Thermographs 1976 is a series of vintage, black-and-white photographs that have maintained, if not increased, their mystery and vitality over the past four decades. Baden applied analog photo-manipulation techniques in-camera, to create images that verge on the abstract and ethereal, before such alterations became popularized and simplified through digital means. Through  tonal manipulation and selective 'halation'-- creating a glowing halo in the highlight areas, the resulting work subverts conventional notions of photography as a form of documentation, rendering otherwise mundane features of urban and suburban landscapes with an otherworldly quality.

The images bring to mind ghosts, auras, even radioactivity; representations of our world touched by something almost supernatural. Nominal subject matter is transformed in ways that strips it to essential forms, paring it down to grainy blocks of light and dark. This metamorphosis unhinges them from present reality and lends them an atmosphere of something captured in the hazy past or dystopian future.