Erika Blumenfeld

Blumenfeld named her process “Lunatype” for its likeness to the daguerreotype and ambrotype processes of the late 1800s.

Erika Blumenfeld (born 1971) is an American transdisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher whose practice is driven by the wonder of natural phenomena, humanity’s relationship with the natural world, and the intersections between art, science, nature, and culture.

Blumenfeld’s artistic inquiries trace and archive the evidence and stories of connection across the cosmos.

Blumenfeld began focusing her artistic pursuits more seriously in 1988 while in high school at Northfield Mount Hermon School.

At that time she was focused on the nature of light through the medium of photography, a subject she would return to throughout her interdisciplinary career.

Discussing Blumenfeld’s longtime obsession with light, scholar Arden Reed, wrote: “’Light’ was the infant Erika Blumenfeld’s first word, as it was literally the last word of Wilhelm von Goethe, another investigator of that phenomenon.

” Blumenfeld’s early black and white photographic abstractions of light and form were first published in the New England Journal of Medicine when she was 19 years old as part of their curated photographic supplementation sections.

Early process experimentation led the artist to invent a unique photographic process in her early 20s, then a student of photography at Parsons School of Design, while working with large-format photographic plates and what she describes as “improvised” chemistry.

Blumenfeld completed most of her college coursework between 1990-1993, including a year co-attending Parsons Paris and La Sorbonne’s Cours de Langue et de Civilisation Françaises de la Sorbonne in Paris, after which time she left her studies and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico to begin her career as an artist.

Blumenfeld is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Smithsonian Fellow, a Creative Capital Awardee and has exhibited her work widely in museums and galleries nationally and internationally since 1994.

Blumenfeld’s first solo exhibition in 1994, titled “Into the Looking Glass,” premiered her first Lunatypes, a series of self-portraits exploring film noire and mythology.

The first museum acquisition of her work, a Lunatype titled “Shattered Illusions,” was procured by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in 1998 under the auspices of then curator Anne Wilkes Tucker.

Blumenfeld developed the Light Recordings process in the winter of 1998, while testing a custom Polaroid film adapter she had built for her 1888 large-format Antony Climax Portrait Camera; the artist kept the lens closed and took an exposure onto a piece of Polaroid film to see if she had any light leaking through her new adapter.

The test revealed that she had a light leak, which exposed the film in an arced gradation, a process that Blumenfeld realized distilled photography down to its essential elements: light and light sensitive material, where light was both medium and subject.

Blumenfeld describes this as a critical moment in her artistic process, where in the months prior to her discovery she was beginning to feel discontented with the photographic medium, realizing that the “photograph of a thing is not the thing itself”.

Her discovery of the Light Recordings process altered the direction of her work, coalescing formal, technical and philosophical progressions in her methodologies, and bringing forth both a conceptual and scientific focus that has been prevalent in her work since.

The artist continued to build her own recording devices, which she describes as like a Camera Obscura, but one which disregards optical mathematics used to achieve proper focal length.

The Light Recordings work spans the first twenty years of Blumenfeld’s career and has been exhibited in museums in the U.S. and abroad, including the Tate Modern, Albright Knox Art Gallery, Nevada Museum of Art, Kunstnernes Hus, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Since the early 2000s, Blumenfeld has been an artist-in-residence at laboratories, observatories and in extreme environments, collaborating with scientists and research institutions, such as NASA, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the South African National Antarctic Program and the McDonald Observatory.

Blumenfeld’s art practice is described as non-traditional and research-based, where the artist has explored many fields and disciplines, including astronomy, geology, planetary science, ecology, environmental conservation, and cultural heritage.

Blumenfeld’s research and inquiry have resulted in interdisciplinary artworks in multiple mediums, including interactive 3D computer graphics and 3D modeling, digital media, photography, video art, painting, drawing, sculpture, and writing, which the artist views as the artifacts of her artistic process.

Blumenfeld was born in Newark, New Jersey.

Although she moved frequently throughout her childhood, she was raised primarily in the Boston/Cambridge area.

Blumenfeld’s curiosity for both the arts and the sciences was encouraged with classes in dance, painting, and classical piano as well as her school’s science, rocket, and computer clubs.

A defining moment looking at another galaxy through a telescope when she was a child ignited her passion for the cosmos.

In 2001, art historian and critic Sue Taylor wrote in Art in America that Blumenfeld’s Light Recordings were “a serendipitous discovery” that could be likened to other lensless photographic processes such as the photogram or cliché-verre.

Describing the artist’s first major museum exhibition, Taylor wrote, “For all its sheer facticity and its reduction of photography (almost) to litmus paper, this work can nevertheless inflict that pang Roland Barthes associated with the punctum.

The real punctum of a photograph, Barthes knew, is time—corrosive and mortal—and Blumenfeld’s fleeting moments of light show us this stark truth anew”.

In 2004, Blumenfeld was offered an artist-in-residence at the McDonald Observatory to image a full lunar cycle from new moon to new moon through an altered telescope, producing her first video installation, Moving Light: Lunation 1011, which has been exhibited widely including TATE Modern.

Scholar and author Arden Reed wrote that in her Light Recordings work “[…] Blumenfeld has photographed nothing but natural phenomena... her project renounces the manipulation of the artist and the mediation of a lens—two things that have been central to photography from its inception.

By banishing style or “self-expression” and by suspending the editing work of the lens Blumenfeld exposes light directly to the recording surface, the tabula rasa.

This is radical empiricism.”

Blumenfeld’s Light Recordings are described as being reminiscent of Minimalism, Op Art and the Light and Space movement, although art critic John Zotos says: “[…]this work operates in the area that sits between the artist and object at a kind of remove as no visible trace of the artist’s identity seems to come through.

This is exactly where the work departs from minimalist dogma and the distillation of content into form; Blumenfeld’s images are essentially of nature, in a specific place, time and duration; therefore, they are filled with commentary about ecological and environmental issues transformed into a minimalist vocabulary”.

Art critic Franklin Sirmans states: “While Blumenfeld’s highly inventive strategies for making photographs are thoroughly of this moment, the physical structure of her finished pieces suggests an affinity with the early Minimalists.

Blumenfeld later completed her coursework and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Photography from Parsons School of Design in 2006.

She went on to earn a Master of Science (MSc) in Conservation Studies (with Distinction) from University College London in 2014 with a thesis on preserving the natural, cultural, tangible, and intangible significance of the dark night sky and our view of the cosmos.

Blumenfeld’s series Light Recordings are a series of photo-based and video-based works that are recordings of natural light onto photographic film and digital sensors without the use of a traditional camera or lens.

The work documents the pure phenomena of light itself across various atmospheric conditions and astronomical cycles, such as solstices, eclipses, lunar cycles, and the Sun’s daily shifting light through the seasons.

The exposures are often installed together in series or a grid format to visually chronicle the recorded light phenomena over time.