British Artist Jo Bradford is a master of the camera-less photograph process. Her work can be described as being ‘photographs of photography’ or pure photographs since they do not represent an external reality, referring only to themselves.

For over 20 years Jo has spent countless hours in her analogue darkroom in Devon UK, working endlessly with only light, coloured filters, photosensitive paper and time itself to create her finely tuned studies of colour. Her meticulous recording of timings and colour combinations are extensively and intricately catalogued so that she can return to these as a starting point for her continued work known as luminograms, tracing light onto light sensitive paper.

Jo Bradford received her Master’s in Photography: Critical Practice from Falmouth University in 2004 and since then has exhibited regularly and widely. She has works in many public and private collections.

The work exhibited here at Photo London is a series of 3 collections entitled Hours, Minutes, Seconds - This being the correlation to how long the exposure to light was to create the colours and gradients in each collection.

Jo says of these works : “They are an exploration of time, but also of colour in terms of their transmittance and reflectance spectra and the overlap between them. Each set captures a unique moment in time, held in stasis on paper during my ongoing journey through colour, light and time. As one colour slips into the next it becomes less of itself and more of its neighbour. These transitions speak to me of loss, of renewed hope and of transformation. This is where the magic of the spectrum exists, and it has drawn me back time and time again, in a bid to capture these gradients and explore the sensations of the pure colour within.”