‘Laser vision’ (2011) forms part of Jesse Marlow’s series, Don’t just tell them, show them, which comprises 50 examples of Marlow’s street photography. The images in this series highlight Marlow’s use of colour 35 mm film to capture the unusual and extraordinary in ordinary everyday settings.
This photograph shows a woman walking past a fish-and-chip shop on the corner of Blackburn and Ferntree Gully Roads in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburb of Clayton. The image depicts the chance encounter of a range of graphic elements in one frame, including the woman’s checked scarf, the blue and white rays painted on a shop window, and other striped forms reflected in the window. In doing so, the picture reveals something of the often fragmented and visually discordant experience of contemporary suburban life. In bringing together these graphic elements, the image recalls the mid twentieth-century colour works of photographers such as Harry Gruyaert and Joel Meyerowittz, and more broadly the work of the great American street photographer Garry Winogrand.
With this work, Marlow won the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize in 2012.
(2020)
Chromogenic prints are printed on paper that has at least three emulsion layers containing invisible dyes and silver salts. Each emulsion layer is sensitive to a different primary colour of light (red, green or blue). The development process converts the hidden dyes to visible colour depending on the amount of light it was exposed to. This type of paper is commonly used to print from colour negatives or digital files to produce a full-colour image. It can also be used to print black-and-white images, giving softer grain and less contrast than gelatin silver prints. Commonly known as c-type prints, chromogenic processing was developed in the 1940s and widely used for colour printing, including for domestic snapshots. While recent years have seen this process accompanied by ink-jet and digital printing technologies, chromogenic printing still remains in use to this day.
