arti St Portf o l i o Carol Golemboski Psychometry elementS Who says traditional darkroom photography is dead? These images by artist Carol Golemboski demonstrate the unique forms of imagery that can be created through the element of time and its relationship to positive and negative densities. Understanding this relationship allows her to combine exposures from negatives as well as add drawings and other marks on a range of translucent to transparent materials for specific exposure and density effects. She also uses Ortho-Litho film to create templates for black marks, drawings, and text. In this way her images are one of a kind, using "mixed media" art techniques. Like amateur psychometrists, viewers are invited to interpret arrangements of tarnished and weathered objects, relying on the talismanic powers inherent in the vestiges of human presence. These images suggest a world in which ordinary belongings transcend their material nature to evoke the elusive presence of the past. Through an examination of fortune telling and clairvoyance, many of the images confront the desperate human desire to know the unknowable, historically referencing the Victorian interest in spiritualism as well as the look of the 19th-century photographic image. Illegible text and arcane symbols in pictures with themes like palm reading, spoon bending, and phrenology force the viewer to consider man's insatiable need to anticipate his own fate. The success of these images relies on the viewer's expectation of truth in the photograph, expanding on age-old darkroom "trickery" to suspend belief between fact and fiction. The romantic ideas suggested by these photographs are enhanced by the nostalgia that accompanies historic photographic imagery, the process of traditional printmaking, and the magic of the darkroom. artiSt Statement Psychometry is a series of black and white photographs exploring issues relating to anxiety, loss, and existential doubt. The term refers to the pseudo-science of "object reading," the purported psychic ability to divine the history of objects through physical contact. 284