“My work with chemigrams is done by spraying or pouring traditional darkroom chemicals onto the surface of photographic film or paper. A monoprint is created. The fixer crystallizes, the developer blackens, the stop bath warps: they all react with the photo emulsion. It’s a perverse treatment of the material since there is no negative, lens, or camera involved. It’s not a reproduction, it isn’t ‘writing with light’, but enlightening what’s latent; written with accidents.
The image of the house was done using a traditional color photo process: RA-4. It is a photogram. Light is projected through an object placed on photographic paper. It’s made without a lens, or a camera. More specifically it’s an RA-4 reversal, in which the image, originally with a black background, is flashed with light, developed with black and white then color developer, and reversed into a milky white background. A positive image. This image represents a sense of longing, perhaps homelessness.
It is toying with the viewer and was made with a toy: at arm’s length, but also yards away. The glimmer through the window is familiar. It suggests an idealized time on a beautiful day and the house dares hold back the sun, yet it shines through. That glimmer is all one remembers. The color of the interior fades away, leaving a skin. Tumbling or hovering; awaiting the viewer and yet it will never house them.”
Ahmed Salvador received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and his BFA from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ahmed has shown his work in various solo and collaborative shows, namely at the Halide Project, Space 1026, and the Sol Mednick Gallery in Philadelphia, at Columbia College’s Hardwick Gallery in Columbia, Missouri, and at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
