Edie Bresler

Beginning July 2017, I set out across neighborhoods in Somerville, Cambridge and Boston, with light-tight packages containing prepared sheets of vellum, coated with cyanotype emulsion. My intention was to make a light drawing of a connection with one or more strangers. A camera-less process, cyanotypes are made using sunlight, creating a silhouette of whatever is in direct contact with the light sensitive emulsion.

Participants lie down, reach and stretch as asked. Trust and a willingness to make something happen fuels the day. “Can I try this? Yes!” Exposures last for fourteen minutes. A relational action in the moment and again many days, weeks, months later when I combine cyanotype moments together like a human jigsaw puzzle. A sum of moving and unpredictable parts, reverberating and rippling exponentially across the boundaries of each page.

 Photography is a relational medium and human connections, real and imagined, sustain and comfort me in these fractious times. 

This is my third project where I combine the medium of photography with social and collaborative actions.