Photagogia

Photagogia began as a response to the work of artist Armen Ter-Mkrtchyan, whose long photographic exposures transform light into something slow, physical, and enduring. His process — involving 20-minute to hour-long exposures on handmade photographic paper — allows light to leave behind a tangible, textured trace. Once developed and treated with powdered pigment, the image emerges not just as representation, but as residue: light engraved in matter.

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Inspired by Armen’s approach, I turned to light itself — not as a tool of representation, but as an active, transformative force. Using color photographic paper, I expose it directly to daylight, without filter or intention, allowing light to flood the surface indiscriminately. In the developer, the paper becomes a deep, wet midnight blue, which slowly dries to black. The luminous past is buried beneath this darkened surface.

Philosopher Marsilio Ficino wrote of light as a union of opposites —

“speed and slowness, absorption and projection, impediment and dissemination.”*
Light, he said, escapes capture, moving freely until it is stopped by a wall.

Following this idea, I fix the darkened paper to a wall and begin to scrape its surface while wet, imagining that beneath the darkness, light has left a trace. What emerges is not a printed image but a drawing made through removal — an act of revealing rather than recording. This process evokes the light, reanimating its presence through abrasion, erosion, and memory.

*Junko Theresa Mikuriya, *A History of Light: The Idea of Photography