Direct Exposure: OPENING SOON

Light, radiation and the unseen

Photography is often seen as a tool for capturing reality, yet Rob and Nick Carter’s Direct Exposure challenges this by embracing the unseen. Using camera-less techniques — photograms and X-rays —the artists harness light and radiation to reveal hidden structures, ghostly traces, and fleeting impressions.

X-rays penetrate surfaces, exposing what lies beneath, while photograms create images through direct contact, turning objects into their own spectral echoes. The interplay of presence and absence, materiality, and immateriality is central to this exhibition. The Carters’ work transforms objects — whether diamonds, animals, or still-life vessels — into ephemeral imprints, where solid forms dissolve into shadow and light.

This tension is heightened in Touched (2018), a collaboration with Colin Glen, in which found objects such as mattress springs and industrial remnants leave behind haunting impressions. These works suggest traces of human presence, reinforcing photography’s role in documenting absence.

A rare burst of colour emerges in a kaleidoscope photogram, fracturing a familiar bloom into a luminous apparition. Throughout, the exhibition reveals light’s ability to transform, distort, and expose, asking us to reconsider what we see and what remains hidden.

Direct Exposure is an invitation to look beyond surfaces, to see not just with the eyes but with an awareness of how light itself can shape, erase, and reimagine the visible world.