Undertow

The very idea of photography is to imitate its motifs as precisely as possible. Today's digital images have a preciseness of millions of pixels. But in photography's infancy, the act of photographing was a significantly more organic and time-consuming process.

Lisen Stibeck has returned to the roots of photography in her new book Undertow, working with the collodion wet plate process, where every exposure requires extensive effort with unpredictable results.

Parallel to this ancient process, Stibeck has developed her own technique where she allows the emulsion of Polaroid photography to live and evolve past the finished exposure. Undertow explores the world of dreams, memory, alternate realities, and parallel lives. These pictures were born somewhere beyond the reach of the artist's conscious self; images that she has then attempted to translate into photography, drawing inspiration from the places that have always inspired her in her work—Sweden, Morocco, France, Mexico, and Iceland.

The result is a series of suggestive art images that are both comely and fateful. At its first exhibition, Undertow was a given success, with all prints sold out in record time.