Albarran Cabrera —– Instagram
Polarized
2024, #55457 Pigments, gampi paper and gold leaf.
“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” “What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean” ― Isaac Newton
We have started 'Opticks' which is neither a series, nor a specific and delimited portion of work. It is meant to be our ongoing learning project using photography as medium. It will help us to better understand Nature, to reveal the invisible, to understand reality from a different point of view and to see familiar forms in a non-figurative way harnessing the feelings of our day-to-day encounters.
In 'Opticks', we follow our initial approach of using photography to investigate the ‘structure of reality’, ‘the why of things’. As Berenice Abbott once stated: to use photography as “the friendly interpreter of science”. The difference with our previous series is that in this case, we investigate the components of Nature which are inaccessible and unviewable, except by means of experiments which render them visible.
The first series resulting from this line of research is "Polarized." In this series, we photograph objects that look transparent to the naked eye but under polarized light the stress within the material is revealed through a process called birefringence. Color patterns emerge because the polarization of a light ray rotates after passing through a birefringent material. The degree of rotation depends on the wavelength. The camera does not capture the object itself, but rather the rotation of light caused by it.
