Pierre Cordier

This morning I purchased a book on icons which, when back at my studio, I placed on the book stand that I keep on the mantelpiece. Once placed there I looked for a good companion for it. I found the V&A exhibition catalogue 'Shadow Catchers' which is about cameraless photography. It was a truly excellent exhibition and the book has many wonderful pictures in it. I opened it to the page, of which there are photographs below, showing 'Chemigram 20/3/92' by Pierre Cordier. The evident crosses in the patterning and the black, deep terracotta and cream colouring lent itself to the pairing with 'The Icon' book next to it.

In the afternoon I went to the V&A museum and popped into the photography gallery. At the end of the long thin room in the right hand corner was Cordier's 'Chemigram' itself. It is a tremendous photograph. I really am at a loss as to how it has been made. It is a very curious technique indeed that has produced a marvellous result. In the V&A it is framed in a thin black hexagonal wooden frame. It looks special.

Its hexagonal form brings to mind a time I was in the garden and I looked up to the blossoming cherry tree to see that the full moon above had become the centre of a six-spoked hexagon, its spokes and its sides having been formed by the vapour trails of planes from nearby Gatwick, formed in symmetry by the graded spherical light of the moon diffusing through the cold mist.