PARNIDIS GRAIN STUDIES

Produced at Nida Art Colony at the Curonian Spit in Lithuania in October 2018, Parnidis Grain Studies explores the local big dune (Parnidis Dune) as an image. The photo-technical concept of resolution* - the resolving of a unit into its individual components - serves as a starting point to create an analogy between the dune's grain of sand as its basic element and the silver crystals that form the analogue photographic image. Following this thought, the dune itself corresponds with the photographic image made up of many small silver crystals.

By analyzing both the dune and the silverhalogenic image down to their very basic element, the single grain, the project circles around the term of graininess as a fundamental aesthetic aspect of photography and the materiality of photographic images. During repeated hikes on the dune, 15 B/W-films of different sensitivity** have been exposed and developed with either a fine grain developer or a push-developer in order to increase the graininess of the images in the course of the project. Literally spoken, the grain is pushed forward to the surface of the photographs and made visible even though its always there anyway. Silver grain and sand grain start to overlap each other, they fade into each other. A series of photograms of sand extends the project as a third photographic way of depiction but also as a different approach to abstraction in comparison to the other images.

This working strategy can be regarded as an entanglement of site-specific and media-reflexive artistic strategies - a method of approaching and seeing a place through the filter of photography and other way round.

*In photography, resolution defines the accuracy with which films or digital sensors can still reproduce subtle structures.

**Film sensitivity has an impact on the graininess of the image, low-sensitivity films have finer grain and high-sens. films have a bigger grain structure because of the use of bigger silvercrystals in the emulsion.