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Evidence from the Religion of Technology is a stunning project that pushes the photograms to another level. The series benchmarks a significant shift in Godman's art practice. Here we see a schism from camera, film, and monochromatic photography into the exploration of the photogram (camera-less photography) which embraces the abstract use of vibrant colour. A wide range of objects are used to create the colours and tonal modulations in the images. The camera, too often seen as the essential component of photography, is discarded as irrelevant. Light, the essential activating force of photography is embraced.
The multiple exposure colour photogram process reproduces mundane objects in an abstract colour that is further disguised by the resulting ghost-like negative representation typical of photograms.
Godman uses the technique to explore issues of the consumer society and the eventual discarding of objects as detritus. In the images, visual reference to found objects lie visually entwined, obscured, and even fused as a new unidentified relic. He compares our obsession with technology to a religious fanaticism, that drives our desire for the new and yet also the disposal of the old. A form of visual form of archeology is required to decipher the content of the images, sifting over the remains of a catastrophic event, where remnants of objects are all that remain.
Within the body of colour photogram works are several sub-series. Single prints, long strips, human figures, and the key work, Evidence from the Religion of Technology, which is a large and, ambitious. This piece includes three full figures, arms outstretched (a female figure, a male figure, and a human skeleton) with a series of associated prints arranged in a linear form, the work spreads for 22 meters across the gallery wall.
The ebook offers an intriguing context, with an insight from the initial experiments with photograms of Fox Talbot in the late 1820s, through the simultaneous rediscovery and adaption by Man Ray and the surrealists in France, and Maholy Nagy and the Bauhaus in Germany a century later. It also includes contemporary works by Alex Syndikas and Harry Nankin and other photogram artists.
