At The Circus is a surreal series of solarised polaroid photos based on circus acts by photographer Paul E Williams.
At The Circus Solaroids
At The Circus is a series of Polaroid photos using a solarisation technique that I have called Solaroids. In 1989 I was inspired by the remarkable French Circus Archaos which revolutionised the notion of what a circus is. Critics described its success in terms of a break with tradition, “the anti-circus circus,” enthused The Irish Times, “a devil’s carnival,” warned The Daily Mail.
Click on any photo to open as a slideshow. Click on the arrow below the photo for the title.
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Solaroids
I was exploring the possibilities of a solarised Polaroid technique that I accidentally discovered and I named Solaroids. Having always been a fan of Man Ray’s abstract solarised photos, which had influenced me heavily in my early days, I found the idea of exploring what solarised Polaroids could do was very exciting.
At the time I had been playing with found objects some of which were rusty tools and chains from a scrap yard, and had become intrigued by the shadows they cast. The Solaroid technique produced photos that has a crystalline surface texture and a gritty street black & white style. With Archaos in mind, I put the two together and created abstract photos of circus acts from the rusty objects, so the At The Circus series was born.
Titles of the Slideshow Photos Below
These are some of the circus acts I created and are as follows: first The Stilt Man, then The Unicycle, next The Strogman and finally The Juggler.
More Solaroid series are : You Are What You Eat, Flying Machines, Metal Morphosing, You Are What You Eat, Dire Straits, Fossils & Shells. To see all my Solaroid series click here and I hope you enjoy the photos.
The Solaroid Technique
Often creativity is about having your eyes open to the happy accidents that happen around you and this is true in this case for the Solaroid technique.
For some reason in the late 1980’s I was using a high speed 10×8 black & white film in the studio and noticed that as I pulled the Polaroid print from its backing, the negative side solarised. In fact this Polaroid stock didn’t have a usable negative and the negative image was barely visible on a black plastic backing sheet, so it was a lucky accident that I saw any negative image at all.
As the negative backing sheet dried the processing gel dried on it and any latent image disappeared. Next, for some reason, I decided to clean the backing lightly with a damp cloth and found that the negative image reappeared.
Finally I copied the Polaroid backing negative onto 5×4 Kodak Ectachrome transparency film which created a usable negative I could print from. To finish I printed the negative onto black and white paper to create Solaroid prints. Once I had perfected the technique I made several Solaroid photos series before regrettably Polaroid stopped making the film stock and the technique was over.
To see more Solaroid Photos click here.
Free Photo eBooks
Sense No Sense The Unimagined Imagined.
A 98 page ebook with black and white avant-garde polaroid Solaroid photos.
Sense No Sense, The unimagined Imagined, is an ebook of Solaroid Polaroid photos taken between 1989 & 1991 using a technique developed by Photographer Paul E Williams. The 98 page ebook depicts unique creative black and white avant-garde fine art photos.
This ebook contains no trackers and is bug free. Just download to your browser and save as a pdf. Please enjoy.
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