Ivar Sviestins. Time, Movement and the Materiality of Photography

Ivar Sviestins. Time, Movement and the Materiality of Photography

For Ivar Sviestins, gum bichromate is more than a historical photographic process. It was an important stage in the development of his photographic language, but it was never an end in itself. What matters more are the questions that emerged through it: time, movement, materiality, touch, memory, the relationship between the concrete and the abstract, and the ways in which the physical form of a photograph can respond to the experience it seeks to convey.

Sviestins particularly values artists who are willing to change direction, explore new territory and resist becoming confined by a recognisable style.[2] His own work follows much the same principle. Different series pursue different questions, and the materials, formats and working methods change with them. What connects these apparently different stages is less a particular technique than a continuing interest in how photography can respond to experience.

Material, movement and time

Sviestins's photographic education was rooted in a highly disciplined approach to the medium. He studied sensitometry and the Zone System and spent considerable time testing films, papers and chemistry. His aim was to understand light and gain control over the full range of values between black and white. When teaching darkroom work and lighting, he jokingly described the grey scale as a “dance floor” - a space in which one could move.[1]

Alternative processes entered his practice only later.[1] This sequence matters because gum bichromate did not emerge as a rejection of technical discipline. It grew out of an already developed photographic practice and opened up other possibilities for constructing the image through materials, pigment and a more extended form of manual work.

One of the most revealing episodes in Sviestins's account concerns a visit to a shop selling watercolour and copperplate papers. He intended to buy five sheets for testing and left with thirty. The range of surfaces and qualities affected him so strongly that the paper itself became a source of inspiration. Pigments had a similar effect, whether dry or supplied in tubes. He also attended watercolour classes to understand how colour behaves when it is built up in successive layers.[1] He later clarified that the papers he encountered came from around the world.[2] The story says something important about his relationship with alternative processes. The starting point was not simply chemistry. It was the material itself. Paper ceased to be a passive support for the photograph. Its surface, texture and physical character became part of the decisions involved in making the image.
Photography and dance came together at an early stage of Sviestins's development. He photographed contemporary dance and it was in this context that he began experimenting with gum bichromate.[1] Movement, however, became a much broader concern. Sviestins does not describe himself as a landscape photographer but rather as an “action photographer”. He is fascinated both by rapid movement and by forms of movement so slow and subtle that they are almost invisible.[2] Seen from this perspective, his landscapes and nature photographs are not simply about places. They are also about processes of change taking place within them.

The connection between subject and process becomes particularly clear in Två, also known as The Intimacy Project. The work centres on two lovers, with skin, touch, sensuality, closeness and tenderness at its core. Sviestins explains that the directness and detail of conventional photographic representation of the body could evoke associations with pornography, fashion or advertising. Gum bichromate, pigment and paper offered him a more subtle physical and visual language for this kind of experience.[1]
The process was therefore closely connected with the subject. Gum bichromate was not chosen simply for the appearance of the resulting print. Its physical qualities became part of the way intimacy could be represented.

This tactile dimension extends beyond the finished object. Sviestins describes the physical desire to touch the print with his fingertips, an impulse that becomes especially meaningful in photographs concerned with skin and intimacy.[1] The sense of touch is also present during the making of the image. He recalls the viscosity of the gum arabic, pigment and dichromate mixture, the movement of the hand, the brush meeting the paper and the physical feedback of the process. He even speaks of a kind of muscle memory that returns simply through remembering the technique.[1] Touch therefore operates simultaneously as subject, material quality and gesture. It is present before the finished photograph exists.

Sviestins's relationship with control is equally nuanced. In his black-and-white work he aimed for a high degree of control over the grey scale, contrast and tonality.[1] When he introduced different pigments in successive exposures, however, the variations between individual prints became greater, and these differences could be welcomed rather than eliminated.[1] The interesting question is therefore not whether a process is controlled or accidental, but where control is useful and where variation can become part of the work. This also gives a more precise understanding of gum bichromate. Its value does not lie simply in unpredictability. The process creates a field in which different degrees of control can be deliberately negotiated.

Gum printing also introduced an unusual density of time into Sviestins's practice. Some prints required several exposures and prolonged water baths. Preparing and hardening the paper, sizing it and carrying out the subsequent stages could make a single print a process lasting around two weeks.[1] Sviestins remembers this period as particularly happy. He would not enter the darkroom unless he had several uninterrupted hours available, because he could completely lose himself in the work. “Time disappeared.” Looking back through his more recent interest in Eastern philosophy, he also sees value in having spent so much time on something entirely non-commercial, undertaken simply for his own pleasure.[2]

Duration, then, is not only a property of the technique. It is also a decision about how one's own time is used. A long process demands that a person accept an activity without an immediate practical or commercial return.

His series Ice shows that this interest in time predates gum bichromate. For six consecutive winters, Sviestins studied ice formations and their movements from a bridge in Stockholm, working in sunlight, rain, fog and snow. The project explored the square format, low-speed black-and-white film, scale and the fluid relationship between the concrete and the abstract. All the photographs were made with a normal lens. After the photographic work was complete, another two years were spent selecting the images and deciding on paper, chemistry and print size.[2] Only later did he realise that he had also been photographing what he describes as “inner landscapes”.[2]

The observation of the outside world thus became a way of recognising something within himself. A similar relationship between duration and attention appears in his comments on photographing fleeting subjects. A photographer may have only a brief moment in which to make an exposure, yet the process of turning that exposure into a finished gum print can continue for days or weeks. For Sviestins, both situations demand concentration on what is happening in the present. The slow process is not the opposite of photographing a moment. It is another way of practising attention.[2]

Change, memory and the life of the work

The idea of time becomes more radical in Mira 0-. The project consists of one portrait for every year of Mira's life, from birth to the present. Sviestins intends to continue until the end of his own life and then hand the project to someone else who can carry it forward until Mira's timeline is complete. He knows that he will not be there to see the final exhibition.[2]

The project is therefore conceived to continue beyond its original author. It is not simply a portrait series but a long-term structure governed by a rule that can be carried on by another person. Sviestins recognises that his own timeline becomes part of the work in the process.[2] There is an important connection here with post-photographic thinking: the artist is responsible not only for making images but also for establishing conditions under which the work can continue.

His series Leaves approaches time from another direction. It began with small, dead, crumpled leaves found on his veranda. They became black-and-white enlargements on mulberry paper. Sviestins describes the resulting images as playful, “dancy” and strange, while also connecting them with the passing of time.[2] These are objects normally swept away and sent to the compost. Photography gives them another status. Something fragile and disposable becomes an object of sustained attention, and the leaf becomes a means of reflecting on disappearance and duration.

Sviestins also introduces a more personal dimension to his understanding of artistic work when he discusses its possible therapeutic function. He writes about the way people can draw nourishment and energy from their “wounds”, and then asks whether one dares to heal - and who one would be after healing. He describes these as deeply existential questions.[2] This does not justify a psychological interpretation of his entire body of work, but it does suggest that photography can serve as a way of confronting personal experience as well as formal or technological problems.

Change itself is central to the way Sviestins understands an artistic career. He places particular value on artists who are willing to explore new territory rather than remain attached to the style through which they have become recognised.[2] His own trajectory reflects this attitude. After an intensive period of darkroom work, he moved into digital photography. He did not experience this as a betrayal of his earlier practice and felt no particular urge to return to the darkroom. At the same time, it took him around ten years to reach, in digital printing, a level comparable to what he had previously achieved with analogue materials and techniques.[1]

What continued was not the technology but the knowledge acquired through it.

Years later, the earlier gum prints returned to his attention. Sviestins describes them as a kind of “time capsule” and wonders why so much of the work had remained unseen.[1] The old prints no longer function simply as examples of a historical photographic process. They have become material records of another period in the artist's life. The paper, pigment, traces of the process, gestures involved in making them and the time invested in their production are all part of what has survived.

A gum print can therefore function as an archive of a way of working as much as an archive of an image.

Sviestins makes a related point when discussing the public reception of his earlier prints. Many viewers did not know what gum bichromate was, yet the historical process itself was not what held their attention. They responded to the images and to the way the works were presented.[1] The observation is worth bearing in mind in contemporary alternative photography, where the name of a historical process can sometimes become almost as prominent as the work itself. A technique may create curiosity, but it cannot replace the image. For Sviestins, what matters is the relationship between the subject and the form through which it is expressed.[1]

Gum bichromate introduced him to Pictorialism and to a wider world of artistic papers, pigments and material approaches to photography. He describes this as entering the world of art through materials.[1] Historically, gum bichromate enabled photographers to move away from the standard appearance of the silver print and to give greater importance to pigment, paper and manual intervention.[3] Sviestins carries part of this material legacy into a different context, without attempting to reconstruct a Pictorialist aesthetic. The historical process became one of the means through which he could develop his own photographic language.
His understanding of the individual work is also shaped by the experience of seeing different series together. Sviestins recalls a major exhibition bringing together work from the early 1980s to the present.  A curator with a strong sense of composition, space and the relationships between bodies of work helped determine how the series were presented.[2] Seen together, individual projects acquire relationships that may not be apparent when they are viewed separately. Movement, time, traces, structure, memory and transformation begin to appear as recurring concerns across very different bodies of work.

Sviestins has described his practice in a more poetic text under the title “Where Words Do Not Reach”. He writes that since childhood he has used the camera in an attempt to understand himself and the world. He is drawn to what lies beneath the surface and beyond it, to the ordinary and the extraordinary, to the “dance of photons”, light, darkness and greys, energy and movement, nature, culture and structure, traces, time, longing, identity, belonging and the ineffable.[2] These words provide a useful way of looking at the different subjects that appear throughout his work. Ice, dance, intimacy, portraits and leaves are not necessarily connected by subject matter. They are connected by the kinds of questions they allow him to approach.

From Pictorialism to post-photography

Sviestins now acknowledges that he is no longer driven by still photography in quite the same way as before. He is uncertain about this new phase, while at the same time being content with it.[2] There is no need to treat this uncertainty as a conclusion. It is consistent with the willingness to change that has characterised his practice from the beginning.

Within the research project “From Pictorialism to Post-Photography”, Sviestins provides an especially interesting case because his work does not follow a simple progression from one technology to another. Pictorialism introduced him to pigment, paper and the material construction of the photographic image. Gum bichromate expanded that experience into prolonged processes involving touch, time and physical labour. Digital photography later became another stage of his practice rather than a rejection of what had come before.

Projects such as Mira 0- introduce a different model altogether. Instead of the individual photograph functioning as the final object, the work becomes a long-term structure whose continuation can extend beyond the lifetime of its author.[2] This is where Vilém Flusser's analysis of the relationship between photographer and apparatus becomes useful. Flusser examines photography through the apparatus and its “program”, understood as the set of technical possibilities and limitations that structures the photographer's field of action.[4] Sviestins is interesting in this context because changing technologies does not appear to lock his practice into a single mode of operation. Different tools become different environments for experimentation, while knowledge developed within one can be carried into another. Post-photography can therefore be understood more broadly than simply as a digital condition. It can also refer to changing relationships between author, image, process, archive and time.

In Mira 0-, the artist does not simply make photographs. He establishes conditions under which photographs can continue to be made after his own participation has ended.[2] The history of photographic processes consequently becomes inseparable from a history of changing models of authorship.

Ivar Sviestins demonstrates that a historical photographic process can remain significant even after an artist has moved beyond it. Gum bichromate gave him a deeper encounter with the materiality of photography. It allowed him to work through paper, pigment, light, touch and duration, and to connect the physical act of printing with subjects such as movement, intimacy and change.

The larger story, however, lies beyond gum bichromate. What continues throughout Sviestins's work is a willingness to observe, experiment and change. Time and movement recur across very different bodies of work, as do traces, materiality, memory and the attempt to approach experiences that resist direct verbal expression.

This is where his work becomes particularly relevant to the transition from Pictorialism to post-photographic thinking. The transition is not simply a history of technologies. It is a history of changing relationships between image, material, author, process and time.

Gum bichromate was one of the languages through which Sviestins explored what photography could become. It was not the answer, but one of the means through which the search continued. Perhaps that is the strongest continuity in his work: not fidelity to a particular technique, but the willingness to allow each new question to demand a different form.

Notes

1. Ivar Sviestins, Responses to the Research Questionnaire, 7 September 2026, private archive of the author.

2. Ivar Sviestins, email correspondence with the author, 8 September 2026, private archive of the author.

3. Christina Z. Anderson, Gum Printing: A Step-by-Step Manual, Highlighting Artists and Their Creative Practice, New York: Routledge, 2017.

4. Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, London: Reaktion Books, 2000.

Bibliography

Anderson, Christina Z. Gum Printing: A Step-by-Step Manual, Highlighting Artists and Their Creative Practice. New York: Routledge, 2017.

Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion Books, 2000.

Sviestins, Ivar. Responses to the Research Questionnaire. 2026.

Sviestins, Ivar. Email Correspondence with the Author. 2026.

Illustration

Ivar Sviestins, work from The Intimacy Project, gum bichromate. Photograph provided by the artist for publication.