A nineteenth-century child’s dress is carefully laid out for our viewing. Perhaps, because we are aware that it is a part of lost time, our thoughts go to its missing inhabitant- an ethereal presence, intricate to the weave of the fabric before us. Adam Fuss

My Ghost is a series of photographs begun in 1994. They represent a personal expression of loss and an attempt to express in visual terms an emotional presence of a human that is now absent. Having worked as a commercial photographer, Adam Fuss is conscious of what he calls the pervasive technological-consumerist culture. In response to this he has returned to the simplest photographic means: photography without the use of a camera. Such procedures recall the earliest photographs of the 1830’s and 1840’s. In Fuss’s work, light is used as a metaphor to illuminate the processes and stages of human life. Fuss constantly re-thinks the photographic process in pursuit of images that embody the ephemeral. Exploring themes of life, death and transcendence, Fuss states that in order for any photographic technique to work, it should be personalised and transfigured into a greater metaphor, engaging processes that take place in the natural world. Using light and chemistry to explore the outer reaches of vision, Fuss works in daguerreotype and camera-less techniques such as photogram, aiming not to reproduce the seen but to discover the unseen. [1]

This is the largest photogravure in the collection.