The Green Flash

Les Walkling, Pyro Soda 1998,
Pigment Print, 520 x 408mm

A friend recently reminded me of the ‘green flash’ which I hadn’t seen for quite some time. My reply included the following:

“How wonderful that you remember the ‘green flash’. It was produced when a Pyro developed film emulsion transferred to an acetic acid stop bath. More importantly, it only occurred when the amount of sulphite (preservative) in the Pyro developer was at a very low concentration. Seeing the ‘green flash’ indicated you had been working with Pyro in an unstable condition. This was not a commercially viable developing solution, but one that oxidised rapidly and at times unpredictably. The instability promoted its staining properties which were at the heart of its extraordinary image quality. Of course the staining properties were only part of a series of attributes contributing to the distinctive Pyro look and sensibility, including local emulsion hardening and the removal (wash off) of the unhardened gelatin to produce a relief image with extraordinary acutance and clarity; its lower silver density but rich translucent (actinic) printing tonality producing less light scatter (loss of detail) in the highlights; the elevation of mid tones and enhanced shadow separation; smooth luminescent skin tones, et cetera. These beautiful physical attributes contributed to the metaphysical validity of what was a very difficult developer to predict or control. The ‘green flash’ also signalled that for all our desire for control and determination (the mythology  of science, for example), the unstable Pyro processing was often out-of-control. Therefore, a priori we had to trust ourselves and our outcomes to that unstable but endlessly beautiful, indeed poetic if not magical process. In the end it came down to an act of faith in an age of discipline and rationality. In other words, the ‘green flash’ was the perfect symbol for what could only be ‘seen’ (that is only known) in the dark – the antithesis of photography. This, at least for me, highlighted the division in photography between ‘what was happening in front of the lens’, compared with what was happening on ‘our side of the lens’. The green flash roundly located our practice in a metaphysical light.”