I will be spending July 2019 as Artist in Residence at the Willa Cather Foundation in Red Cloud, Nebraska. https://www.willacather.org/events/beauty-ordinary
I shall be creating photographic images of the surroundings relating to the home town of Cather and the novels set there. The images will be made using alternative and traditional photographic materials and techniques, some of which would have been used in her time at the turn of the last century.
With minimal facilities for this kind of work it will be challenging but interesting and will culminate in an exhibition during August and September.
Types of Work
The types of work I plan to produce are:
Intstant prints on watercolour paper.
Using my last stash of Fuji peel apart film, no longer produced, will add a rarer element to this mono print process.
I hope to use this to capture images of the prairie plants. The intial development process is interrupted and the negative placed on the paper and transferred with roller pressure. The texture of the paper will help to reveal the texture of the plant. The image size is about 3.5″x4″. That is if it all works. The timing of the steps is critical, the film itself is a little old saving it for this project but. The effect can emphasise colours, or change them slightly; there may be minor artifacts, all giving it a unique appearance.
VanDyke brown prints:
Using my 8×10 camera I have been working on old processes of coating paper with light sensitizing solution then placing a negative directly onto this, exposing to UV light followed by chemical steps to create the final print.
The lovely warm tones produced enhance certain scenes but the whole prcocess is fraught with many variables affecting the image; the coating, acidity, temperature, humidity, density of the negative. This adds to the attractiveness of the process, the uncertainty of the outcome, the scope for artistic manipulation through the alchemy. So, although many prints can be made from the same negative each will be different.
Direct Positive Mono Prints
With the 8×10 inch large format camera exposing Ilford positive paper in the camera then processing normally produces a positive print, though the image is reversed. Each print is unique and is another process difficult to maintain consistency.
Lumen Prints
If it is practically possible I may be able to create lumen prints of the prairie plants.
This process involves placing an object on photographic paper, glass on top, then exposing to sunlight for an hour two then rinsing in fixer.
It produces these ghostly images with a sense of depth of the structure.
All of these processes produce unique prints but there are many variables to control which is part of the attraction and gives the opportunity create different tones and effects.
Whenever I try a new process I usually experience some sort of beginners luck and produce a great image with little effort. But then after a while nothing works right, the tones are wrong and you can’t work out why. Then it is hard work, especially to convince yourself that you are not a failure and to slog on. I was heartened to read in the memoirs of the wonderful photographer Sally Mann, entitled Hold Still, that she experienced exactly the same.