Psychometry Reading

Carol Golemboski
Stereoscope
Silver Gelatin Print

This spring Carol exhibited her Psychometry series at the Rowe Arts Gallery, and taking the chance to attend the accompanying lecture with the opening, I was able to receive insight as to her methodology and inspiration for some of the images. After browsing the works, I became drawn to the various objects depicted in her images. Some were teeth, some were hands, some were photograms of small animals, and towards the back along with the later parts of her series, I saw stereoscopes being used in her images. I had a chat with the curator about the novelty of these items and how to photograph for their use. It was neat to see Carol reference this object, as a lot of her scenes depicted common novelty items.

Working with a Hasselblad 2-1/4, Carol gave account to how hard it was for her to begin scratching the negatives. For anyone that works with film, you know that the negative is all you have to revert back to.  If a print becomes botched, it can be redone, but if a negative becomes scratched, it requires reshooting altogether. After overcoming this feat, she felt liberated to make the marks become part of her methodology. The scratches were done intuitively based upon the image itself, often in conjunction with the shapes of the subjects themselves and sometimes expressive in nature matching the overall feel for the image. It often created a vignette for the picture plane. 

Most all her works were printed at 20x20 square format, with exception to her earlier works. For this print in particular, I felt as though it were in motion, as though these enchantments were being spun around the object, conveying the sense of a seance. Carol was interested in the popular superstitions attributed to her found objects, and for many of them, the objects selected were associated with varying points in her life. For a stereoscope, people were fooled by the appearance of a multidimensional space depicted in a 2-Dimensional picture plane. The lure of this image is still playing on the age-old hype of darkroom magic.