Lucy Raven's 'Socorro!' photobook explores shadowgrams, ballistics, and Manifest Destiny

Lucy Raven's photobook 'Socorro!' features 60 shadowgrams created at New Mexico Tech between 2021 and 2022. The artist fired 3D-printed projectiles filled with magnesium, aluminium, and gravel into a black-box room, recording material motion on photosensitive paper. These images visualize flow patterns with smudges, faint grids, stains, and bright white specks that are actually holes in the paper. David Levi Strauss's essay 'The Aesthetics of Unknowing' opens the book, questioning how we interpret images and examine our beliefs. Art historian Pamela M. Lee contributes 'The Sound of Falling Bodies,' connecting shadowgram technology to ballistics research that advanced weapons manufacture, crime-scene forensics, and aerodynamics. Raven's work interrogates Manifest Destiny, linking American expansion to firearm development and the displacement of Native peoples. The shadowgrams exist between science and art, capturing light on paper to collapse past and present shadows. Published by Mack Books for £65 in hardcover, the book presents photography in its purest form while revealing underlying violence through pierced paper and forced smudges.