Jessica Eaton

Eaton was born in Regina, Canada, and studied photography at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Fonderie Darling's biography traces a career that developed through Canadian and broader North American photography institutions.^*9

For her BFA work at Emily Carr, Eaton shot Silly String through the air and photographed its movement with a large-format camera. Even as a student, she was testing how exposure itself transforms light and motion into an image.^*6 In Quantum Pong (2006), she dropped roughly 500 ping-pong balls from a height and made four exposures during a single fall, leaving several moments of motion within one photograph.^*2

This shift coincided with the period in which Photoshop and digital compositing became commonplace. Eaton chose an analog 4×5 camera and processes inside the film itself, constructing photographic artificiality through exposure itself, before postproduction.^*4

Eaton's reason for working with photography lies less in its ability to reproduce visible form faithfully than in the capacity of photosensitive material to accumulate light in ways unlike the human eye. She has defined photography broadly as “radiation-sensitive material” recording radiation-based information.^*15 Under that definition, the camera becomes more than a box that preserves what was seen. It is an apparatus that recalculates different colors of light, separate moments, and reflectance on the same film.

RGB Multiple Exposures

In Cubes for Albers and LeWitt, cubes painted white, black, and several shades of gray are exposed repeatedly on the same sheet of film, with red, green, and blue filters placed in front of the lens for different exposures. Higher Pictures explains that the colors in the finished images were not painted on the objects; they are generated on film through additive color mixing.^*1

Red, green, and blue light becomes brighter as it overlaps, approaching white when all three are sufficiently combined. Because this process works in the opposite direction from subtractive mixing in paint, Eaton turns color theory from a reference to painting into a phenomenon that can be tested inside the photographic apparatus.^*6

Layering Multiple Times in One Image

In Quantum Pong, separate moments accumulate on one negative. Capture Photography Festival describes the work as four exposures made while roughly 500 ping-pong balls were falling, creating translucent overlaps that reveal distinct layers of time.^*2

Each time Eaton rotates a cube, changes a mask, or adds another exposure, earlier light can be weakened or intensified by what follows. As Canadian Art described it, the process resembles a “strategy game”: she cannot see the completed picture while making it; she has to remember the amount of light already recorded and calculate the next move.^*6

Making Color Inside the Camera

In an interview with The Guardian, Eaton describes herself as “using the inside of the camera.”^*4

This decision moves the work away from a simple test of whether an image is digitally manipulated. The finished picture contains colors that did not exist in the scene, yet those colors are also physical records of light passing through filters and reaching film. Photographic construction and indexical contact therefore remain present in the same image.^*5

In an interview with FOAM, Eaton said she wanted to resist the idea that photography is bound to the world as it appears to the human eye at a single moment.^*15 With repeated exposures through RGB filters, each exposure records light that actually reached the film, but the human eye never saw the finished combination of colors simultaneously during the shoot. Eaton uses this gap to separate photographic recording from the assumption that a photograph must reproduce the appearance visible to the naked eye.

Albers and LeWitt

The series title explicitly names Josef Albers and Sol LeWitt, but the work does not imitate their styles photographically. The Photographers’ Gallery cites Eaton's description of the cube as a “platform” on which other ideas and phenomena can be projected.^*5

Albers's work on color perception and LeWitt's use of rule-based structures became reference points for Eaton's design of photographic procedures.^*3 The camera functions less as a device for faithfully copying a visible object than as an instrument for applying predetermined rules to light and time and then testing the result.

cfaal

The Cleveland Museum of Art presented cfaal as abstract photography in which RGB filters, movement, and multiple exposure unsettle the logic of time and space.^*3

In cfaal, the gray cube in the studio and the vivid colors in the finished photograph are not the same thing. The color fields result from RGB filters, rotations of the cube, masks, and the order of exposures acting on a single negative.^*21 The photograph therefore contains visual information about the object's presence and about the procedure through which light was administered to the film.

The Photographers’ Gallery describes cfaal 312 as both a record of technique and a record of an object. The record includes the cube, the filters, the number of exposures, and the accumulation of light that produced the image.^*5

Polytopes and Iterations

After cfaal, Eaton continued to combine masks, reflection, movement, and multiple exposure, developing increasingly complex geometries. Higher Pictures presents Iterations as the cumulative result of several years of intensive analog experimentation.^*16

Capture Photography Festival describes her repeated photographing of gray cubes onto the same 4×5-inch negative, using different gels and exposures to generate optical phenomena.^*13 Holding the object to a simple cube creates a controlled field in which color, exposure, and reflectance can be compared without the narrative associations of a more descriptive subject.

Flowers and Natura Morta

In later flower photographs, recognizable subjects return, but the manipulation of light and color continues. M+B describes the flowers as moving between lush still life and spectral image, producing states that cannot be perceived by the naked eye.^*7

During the pandemic, Natura Morta (Luce Danzante) emerged from the practical condition of being unable to work in the studio. Higher Pictures presents the series as a reconstruction of existing “light-painting” methods under a strict set of rules.^*8

Bradley Ertaskiran's artist page places recent Natura Morta works alongside pieces using silver-gelatin and pigment printing, confirming that Eaton's methods are not fixed to the early color multiple exposures. She maintains an optical experimentalism while reconsidering support and output from work to work.^*20

Higher Pictures' archive shows Eaton continuing after cfaal to extend the same fundamental concerns—multiple exposure, color separation, reflectance, and movement—into different subjects.^*10 Even as the object changes from cube to flower or more elaborate construction, the work consistently refuses to explain the photographic image solely through the visible appearance of the subject.

M+B likewise places Iterations and later works within the same development after cfaal, framing Eaton's work as a sustained investigation of light, filters, multiple exposure, and reflection across multiple series.^*14

Analog Photography in the Digital Era

The fact that Eaton's photographs are often mistaken for digital composites has become an important part of their reception. The Guardian and TIME repeatedly explain that the vivid colors arise from accumulated exposures, with no postproduction colorization.^*4

Eaton's analog procedure is not nostalgia for photography before the digital era. She has used computers to work out compositions while relying in the final image on errors and material responses specific to film, wood, paper, and light.^*17 At a moment when digital images had become ordinary, the work demonstrates that major acts of construction can occur through exposure and filtering inside the camera as well as through software after capture.

FOAM's 2014 exhibition Under Construction brought Eaton together with Sara VanDerBeek, Kate Steciw, Lucas Blalock, and others as artists reconsidering the value and meaning of photography amid digitization.^*23 They share a refusal to treat the finished image as simply “what the camera saw,” but their methods diverge. VanDerBeek constructs objects to be photographed, Steciw cuts and materializes existing JPEGs, and Blalock leaves traces of digital editing visible. Eaton concentrates manipulation inside the camera and film, giving optical and chemical procedures a distinctive place within contemporary constructed photography.

Experimental Photography After Moholy-Nagy

The Cleveland Museum of Art's Process and Abstraction grouped Eaton with Mariah Robertson and Alison Rossiter as artists for whom the process of making a photograph becomes its subject, displacing straightforward description of an external motif.^*3 This moves beyond the idea that “abstract photography” simply means photographs of nothing recognizable: exposure, photosensitive materials, chemistry, and time become visible as the mechanisms that make an image.

For Eaton, abstraction does not emerge by removing the subject. Cubes, light, filters, and film are all materially present, but their relation produces an image beyond ordinary visual experience. The abstraction becomes a demonstration of what the photographic apparatus can do.^*18

Eaton does not treat this experimental impulse as something new to the digital era. In an interview with Canadian Art, she spoke of an affinity with Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy and of her attraction to a period in which experimental photography and conventional portraiture could coexist as questions directed at the same medium.^*6 Moholy-Nagy's photograms exposed the relation between light and photosensitive paper without a camera; Eaton keeps the 4×5 camera, filters, and three-dimensional objects in place and turns the sequence of light passing through the lens itself into an abstract image.

At Western University in 2015, Ruth Skinner completed an MA thesis comparing Eaton and Erin Shirreff, In Time But Not Of Time: Jessica Eaton and Erin Shirreff’s Counterpoints of View.^*22 Shirreff photographs small models and sculptures, examining how scale and physical presence change when three-dimensional objects become two-dimensional images.^*24 Eaton, by contrast, repeatedly photographs real objects through RGB filters and multiple exposures, building colors and temporal structures on film that the eye could not see all at once. The comparison clarifies a broader development in photography after 2000: artists increasingly made the process of translation into a photograph part of the work itself, challenging the idea of the medium as a faithful transfer of an object's appearance.

Separating the Color of the Subject from the Color of the Photograph

The National Gallery of Canada holds multiple works from the cfaal series, placing Eaton's in-camera experiments within a national public collection.^*11 In 2019 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.^*12

RGB multiple exposure demonstrates why photographic recording cannot be equated with the appearance visible to the naked eye at the moment of exposure. Each exposure records light that actually reaches the film, yet the final image combines different colors and times on one surface and therefore does not correspond to any scene the photographer saw all at once. Eaton herself defines photography more broadly than the reproduction of visible appearances, describing it as a system in which photosensitive material records information carried by light.^*15

The contours of Eaton's work become even clearer beside other process-oriented photographers of her generation. In 2011, CONTACT Photography Festival paired Eaton and Lucas Blalock in a two-person exhibition, describing Eaton's construction of images through analog masking and RGB exposure while Blalock left Photoshop layers and editing traces visible.^*19 Neither treats the unedited camera image as photography's natural state. Eaton concentrates manipulation in the physical process of camera and film; Blalock exposes the marks of digital processing on the surface of the image.