Materia by Vic Bakin

Vic Bakin became interested in how long-expired photographic paper changes. He started looking for it and received packs from different regions of Ukraine. The most interesting ones had been opened before, and the paper held an occasional fingerprint. Because the paper was relatively cheap, he did not test on strips or small pieces as he had in Epitome. He printed on the full sheet straight away and guessed the exposure, so no two prints were the same, and that difference became part of the work. For Bakin, old paper is the right surface, not a clean one that keeps pretending. It lets the image fade rather than resist it.

Lack of control has become more present in his practice. The image does not always behave as he expects. Sometimes the material changes it, weakens it, almost erases it, and in the end he trusts the process more than his first idea. He is left wondering where it will lead. He exposes the surface that barely holds the image, and it resists what he projects onto it. He tries again and again, staying close to the process, not to understand it but to stay with it. He refuses a surface that promises permanence and changes it until it stops lying. Some sheets have so little contrast that they can barely hold the image, and the uncontrolled storage left freckles, a light vignette or a hazy glow that never appeared on new paper.

Returning to his archive, Bakin sees that a photograph can seem more certain than the life it shows. Some photographs still look as if they were made yesterday, though they are not. To stop the lie, he keeps them before the present moment, not to preserve them but to place them where they cannot pretend to be present. It makes him anxious, almost angry, that he cannot stop things from fading and time from slipping away. More and more, he feels it is not him who looks at a photograph, but the photograph that looks at him. For Bakin, photography is always an experiment. When he has not been out clicking the shutter for a long time, he goes into the darkroom, dips his fingertips in chemicals, and tries to catch something in those dark waters. He still has not fully worked out why he does it. Maybe it is the fulfilment he gets from creating, or maybe he wants to say something in his own language. The hardest part is to articulate it.