lucent

Speculative reconstruction.

A speculative reconstruction of archival photographs through visual intervention, reworking images to show how memories shift, fade, and are continually rebuilt over time.

A speculative reconstruction of archival photographs through visual intervention.
"Lucent" reinterprets archival photographs of people, transforming them through luminograms and other experimental processes.

Scientific Fictionalism and Memory.

Drawing on scientific fictionalism — the idea that constructed models can reveal truths about the world — the series treats photographic interventions as speculative tools for understanding memory. It asks how light, materiality, and reinterpretation can honour the past while acknowledging the instability and reconstruction inherent in remembrance.

Photography as Witness

This work explores how photography bears witness to histories marked by rupture, trauma, and survival. Working with archival materials connected to those who lived through the concentration camps, the project examines how visual traces shape our understanding of the past. Rather than treating photographs as neutral documents, it approaches them as active participants in the construction of memory: fragile, partial, and continually reinterpreted.

Fictional Models and Historical Instability.

Scientific fictionalism provides the conceptual framework for this approach.
In philosophy of science, fictional models are used to illuminate aspects of reality that cannot be accessed directly.
Here, photographic processes function in a similar way: as speculative models that reveal the instability of historical memory. By reworking archival images through controlled gestures, light interventions, and material transformations, the project treats each photograph as a site where fiction and evidence coexist. These constructed images do not replace history; they model its fragility, its gaps, and its continual renegotiation.

Techniques and Material Language

The series combines multiple photographic techniques: vintage glass negatives sourced from a French flea market, photocopies, digital reinterpretations, and luminograms created on Louis Lumière paper using the brief flare of a match. Each method introduces its own material language: the grain of a photocopy, the unpredictable bloom of light, the fragility of century-old negatives. These variations mirror the layered and unstable nature of memory itself.
Luminograms play a central role, their ephemeral forms acting as metaphors for presence, disappearance, and the uncertain survival of historical traces.

Ethical Engagement With Archives

Ethical engagement with archival photographs is fundamental to the project. I approach historical materials with care, ensuring they are contextualised rather than appropriated. Many images come from familial or historically grounded sources, and I treat them as testimonies that require sensitivity. The aim is not to reproduce history but to examine how its narratives evolve and how visual representation shapes remembrance.

Challenging Historical Expectations

By layering archival references with experimental photographic processes, the project challenges conventional expectations of what a historical photograph should reveal. It occupies a space between documentation and artistic reconstruction, questioning how images shape, and sometimes distort, our understanding of the past. Through the lens of scientific fictionalism, the work proposes that photography can generate speculative yet meaningful models of remembrance, offering new ways of engaging with histories marked by trauma and resilience.

Absence, Presence, and Reimagining Memory

Through iterative experimentation, the project develops images that embody the tension between absence and presence. It expands the visual language of remembrance, offering new perspectives on how memory is formed, preserved, and reimagined.