From the series Pocket Money I, 2014.

Imprints of tased copper coins on photographic paper. Hand-coloured print, 40 x 30 cm.

The series Pocket Money I consists of six prints, each of which show the amount of copper coins I held in my pocket on the particular day the corresponding image was made. I placed the collected coins on photographic paper, electrically charged them with a DIY taser, thus leaving the contours of the coins and the characteristic shapes of the electric discharges imprinted on the paper, which was directly illuminated and exposed by the sparks.

The initial idea for the pocket change series traces back to Etienne Trouvelot’s images of electric sparks from the 1880s, for which he frequently made use of copper coins as conductive objects. Together with his study of lightning, this French artist and astronomer researched the behaviour of electricity by means of photography. In his experiments Trouvelot employed photography in a radical manner, putting to use what most other photographers considered errors. His images were produced by discharging an electric spark between two photographic plates stacked back to back. As Trouvelot explained, the recorded electric phenomenon was the direct projection of its own image on a light-sensitive plate. By illuminating and recording itself, electricity was able to produce a self-generated image, an acheiropoieton in the true sense of the word.