Blogging for Thor: A Recipe for Success

Hello Spiders. As you know, because you read everything I post online, I have been struggling with graduate school. I've always struggled to fit into the Fine Arts community, and it's been particularly bad this year, after not having to worry about it for six years or so. I've been more focused on education, community engagement, experimentation, learning and process. But to succeed in graduate school, I need to be thinking about conversation, experience, presentation and conceptuality. Super fun, right, Spiders?

It was speaking with David Hilliard, the visiting artist for my graduate class, that I was finally able to articulate these difficulties and start coming to a resolution. I've been looking at work by people like Alison Rossiter, Chris McCaw, Brittany Nelson, Marco Breuer, and Christina Z. Anderson. What I needed to do was focus less on the process as the work, and more on the finished image. I'm turning things around and using the techniques I love to make images that are beautiful and engaging on their own.

After talking with David, I went back through my archives and started looking for the really unique, engaging images. I settled in on the food-based lumen-chemigrams that I began experimenting with two years ago. There's a small gallery of them on my Flickr (LINK), but I never really pursued the idea. It was fun, though, and it actually meshes very well with what I've been doing recently at grad school.

My nod to process, and to experience, is to frame my prints as the product of a recipe. The prints exist as themselves, pieces of art to be visually engaging and aesthetically stimulating. But, with each print, there is a recipe. The materials and process used to create that print, listed plainly. In fact, there is literally a recipe, on a recipe card. I work in the kitchen, that's been the center of my process since I left undergrad. Everything I've been doing has been safe for the kitchen, and generally the kitchen has been my darkroom. I carry the same experimental desires I have with photography into cooking, so why not bring things full circle?

The recipe cards I've been making for each print frame the print as a product of my own past, my interests, events in my life and hopes for my future. The same way a cake recipe might be "Kathy's Birthday Cake" and carry with it all the significance of the event it was created for, my photographic recipes are things like "Orange Rice Mitochondria" and carry with them my memories of a favorite book (A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'Engle) as well as representing my interest in biology, science and evolution. Each recipe carries a personal snippet that ties the image back to my life.

So, seriously Spiders, this shit better be Fine Art. Because, I'm actually enjoying it, and I am tired of starting over.

My main task is going to be creating new prints despite terrible weather (apparently New England does not believe in sunlight until July or something..) and tying the appearance of the print to the actual driving force behind the print. My next piece, pH Balance Of Milk And Citrus, needs to actually incorporate the ideas of balance, chemical forces, and somehow reference the destructively complementary nature of acids and bases. Fun, right? Actually... yes!

Blogging for Thor: Stepping Up to the Wet Plate

Today, I made my first wet plate that I actually made myself from start to finish. It's pretty cool. The exposure came out a bit dark, though, which is sad. And it's suuuuuper dusty.

I tried dropping the keys I was holding about 4 seconds before the end of the exposure, but it didn't really register. It just made the image a bit blurry. Though, the exposure was 75 seconds long, so I'm sure some of that blur is just my hands moving.

Overall, it was an enjoyable experience. I wish it wasn't so toxic, expensive and involved to make wet plate images. I'd love to shoot my buddies up here. I have so many ridiculously good looking friends here in Boston, it'd be awesome to make wet plates of them all.

The coating came out fairly well, though. That's nice.

Blogging for Thor: Salty Colors

I've been wondering for a while if you can apply chromoskedasic chemistry to alternative process prints. It turns out that, yes, you can. Chromo chemistry will affect salt prints.

Now, before all you Spiders get excited and scurry off, the chromo chemistry tests are so far not terribly dramatic. The activator (potassium hydroxide) definitely seems to have restored some of the redder tones in the print. I applied activator to the leaves in different ways. Stabilizer, so far, has very little effect. It's buffered fixer. The stabilizer was applied roughly to the negative space of the image.

All these results should be taken with a note: the print I tested on is probably one of the worst examples I could have used. Chromo chemistry works best on un-exposed highlights, and these prints are super solarized photograms. There are no highlights left.

So this weekend I'll be doing a regular salt print to test chromo chemistry on. It'll be interesting to see what happens with that.

Also, I decided to see what happens after sunlight and time are applied to a chromo-salt print. So I have this print soaking in a dilute solution of stabilizer and activator, sitting in a metal foil tray, next to a window. I'll check it for changes tomorrow!

Blogging for Thor: Developing Developments

Day 7 of Exposure, Unsalted Silver Nitrate Print

I've currently put my "un-salt" prints on hold for a bit, but I'm sure that I'll be back to them soon. Part of that was finding out that the "cupric chloride" I got from Bostick & Sullivan was actually cuprous chloride. That little difference means quite a lot, since cuprous chloride is a fair bit more dangerous to work with than cupric chloride. It's also not water-soluble at all, so even if I wanted to risk it, I couldn't make a solution out of it. So, that sucked. I do still have several more chemicals, including cesium chloride, that I'm looking forward to testing out. For right now, though, I'm focusing on my actual prints instead of pure research.

What I've been doing lately is making scans of the prints as they develop. This means not only do I get to track the degredation of the print once it's made, I get to see what's happening as the exposure goes on. Since my exposures are upwards of two days, this works pretty well. I'm expecting this will go faster once there starts being brighter, hotter days again.

Overall, I'm enjoying getting a glimpse at the work from the other side. Normally I only get to see if out of the frame when it's finished exposing. I might lose some detail and registration this way (since I have to take the print out of the frame, remove the photogram object, then reassemble the thing after scanning) but I'm getting a lot more information. The process of development is really more fascinating than the process of print decay.

Blogging for Mani: Worth their Salt

It seems like everyone is loving on salt prints lately! In the last few days Christina Z. Anderson and J. Keith Schreiber have posted some very in-depth and interesting material about salt on the Alternative Processes Facebook group. Really, Spiders, that's a great place to be if you're working in alt processes.

Christina Z. Anderson's post (HERE) was about the fancy-schmancy new paper by Hahnemühle: Platinum Rag. It's designed for (duh) platinum printing, but also produces good results for all manner of other processes. Diana Bloomfield used it to do a multi-layer gum print without any additional sizing! That's pretty impressive. Aside from the coolness of this (expensive) new paper, I enjoyed seeing someone else doing the same kind of rigorous testing that I'm doing with chemistry. The difference between gelatinized and non-gelatinzied paper is something I'm also going to end up testing, too.

Keith Schreiber's post (HERE) is more a general thing about salt printing. He talks about how it can have an even longer tonal range than platnium printing, which I didn't actually know. Kinda makes me wonder what the point of platinum is, since everyone always gushes about it's incredible tonal range. Plus, at the end of his post, he links a Salt Printing PDF from a printer working at the Fox Talbot Museum. More fun things to study! I also like that he provides very clear examples of various toning effects. It's nice to see well-documented information. I feel that's a big downside to the book by Christopher James. He gives examples of toned photographs, or variations on a process, but he doesn't provide (often probably can't, since he sources his examples from numerous other artists) side-by-side examples so you can see the difference between Approach A and Approach B. That side-by-side is hugely important to me.

Blogging for Thor: Deadly, Deadly Chromium!

6 hour exposure of dichromate test print

After my Facebook conversation last week with Johannes Schmidt, I decided to investigate the interaction of dichromate and salt printing for myself. The flaming reds and oranges he was able to get from dichromate make a perfect contrast to the verdigris green that solarized silver salts can produce with sufficient exposure!

So, I made a small salt print (the normal way, with 3% kosher salt), then added a drop of 5% ammonium dichromate to the top left and a drop of 5% potassium dichromate to the bottom right. In the middle of the print, I sprinkled the cream of tartar. Cream of tartar is chemically potassium bitartrate (KC4H5O6), which is a form of tartaric acid.

Again, my discussions with Johannes suggested that adding tartaric acid to a salt print should produce some variations of color. In the future, I'll test this further by mixing up a tartaric acid solution, probably just cream of tartar in water. Then I'll coat that solution onto a salted paper, in addition to regular sodium chloride.

Just to add some variety, I put a Red Nightshade leaf onto the salted, dichromated and tartarated paper. Then I exposed the paper for about 6 hours in sunlight, from dawn till around noon. Once I'd scanned the image after the first exposure, I let it sit out in sunlight (without the leaf) for another 2 days before I scanned it again. I've continued to leave it unprotected, so I'll be scanning again in a few weeks.

After 2 hours, the red color in the dichromate was lovely. Unfortunately, after the two days of sunlight, the dichromate had turned mostly violet, while the silver was the expected green. The cream of tartar had left slightly darker spots, but I'm not sure if that's just because it affected the original 6-hour exposure, or if it chemically created a reaction. Further testing is required!

I also did some tests on Potassium Iodide and Potassium Chloride salt prints. I'll have those results up on Flickr in the near future. They haven't been washed and fixed, yet. That's on the agenda for today, though!

Blogging for Thor: Chemical Crossovers

Potassium Dichromate (K2Cr2O7): a rather nasty
but potentially beautiful little chemical

I really enjoy the ability of social media to bring together artists from all across the world. After posting yesterday's blog on the Alternative Photographic Processes Facebook group, I got some wonderful responses from Serdar Bilici, Johannes Schmidt and Mark Osterman. So, instead of sharing some of my own work today, I'm going to be discussing ideas from these fine folks.

Serdar informed me that he had previously made images using silver citrate, silver tartarate and silver carbonate instead of a silver halide. Unfortunately, he did not have any scans of these images, but he did say that he found them either too low in d-max, or too high in contrast for negative printing. Here's a list of what he said he used to create the different silver compounds

Silver Citrate = Silver Nitrate + Sodium Citrate
Silver Tartarate = Silver Nitrate + Tartaric Acid (maybe from cream of tartar?)
Silver Carbonate = Silver Nitrate + Sodium Carbonate (soda ash)

Basically, all that means that silver compounds aside from halides can likely be used to print visible images. I'm going to give these a try most definitely, especially since soda ash and cream of tartar are so easy to get. Sodium citrate is available from the university lab, so I'll be giving that a shot as well.

Mark Osterman discussed with me the fixing ability of potassium iodide. Previously, I had fixed several prints in 5.6% potassium iodide, but not noticed any significant difference in the result from the more traditional sodium thiosulfate fixer. If anything, the potassium iodide leaves a warmer tone in the fixed image, but both fixing processes remove a lot of the color from a salt printed image. Mark says that, in theory, a salt print fixed in potassium iodide should turn yellow as the silver is converted to silver iodide. He also recommended that I find a copy of Records of the Dawn of Photography, which is a published version of Talbot's early notebooks. Unfortunately, that book sells for over four hundred dollars and there aren't any circulating copies in my local libraries. I may be able to visit a nearby university (I'm in friggin Boston) and make scans or notes. I'll have to look into that.

The most interesting conversation, though, was with Johannes Schmidt. He told me that he'd run across some literature a bit over a year ago that suggested adding salts of organic acids to the standard sodium chloride and silver nitrate mixture used in salt printing could alter the color of the print. He mixed up solutions of potassium or sodium compounds of acetate, ascorbate, formate, succinate and tartrate. These solutions were applied along with sodium chloride to paper, which was then sensitized with silver nitrate. He also tested the effects of dichromate, iodine and photographic developer on the silvered paper. There are some truly lovely results, especially from the dichromate. In fact, I'm going to borrow some ammonium dichromate from the university and do some tests of my own with applying it to salt prints.

Who knows, maybe I'll give up on this whole "photogram" thing and just create my images through pure chemistry. Chemigrams are popular, right?