Blogging for Thor: Physics, and Chemistry, and Geometry, Oh My!

Photogram by Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, for inspiration.

Last time I did a long-term project, it was about paper. I decided that I wanted to form a new habit. So for 251 days, I made a photograph of paper every night. It was a great experience, and I even got some nice images out of it. Some crappy ones, maybe even mostly crappy ones, but overall it was a good project. The core of the project was a set of four rules.

Since I enjoyed the project so much, I'm going to start again. Not the Folded Paper Project, but something similar. Another project with a strict set of rules, a time-table, and enough scope that I won't have to worry if each one comes out perfectly. I want that kind of structure and freedom. I'm trying, and so far succeeding, at enjoying art again. Hopefully this will add another dimension.

My thesis is all about food, so the exotic chemicals I've been experimenting with aren't appropriate. That's where this project comes in. I'll be using alternative photographic processes, whatever chemicals I find appropriate to use. So I can experiment with salt, cyanotype, maybe even platinum or gold! I'm giving myself a lot of room here to experiment with chemicals.

This project is going to be a lot more complex than the Folded Paper Project. I won't just be taking pictures. Instead, I'm going to be making mixed alternative process prints that combine elements of chemigrams and photograms. 

So, instead of a set of "rules" there will be a set of "steps."

• Step 1: Draw a geometric design on a 5x5 square of smooth-finish cotton rag paper, using light pencil lines. Only two different types of geometric shapes can be used (circles, squares, hexagons, triangles, etc).
• Step 2: Paint alt process chemistry onto the geometric design, filling in each shape with chemistry to create a sort of alt process coloring book. Chemicals from up to two processes may be used for this.
• Step 3: Layer photogram materials of varying opacity on top of the paper once the chemicals have dried. These photogram objects must also be geometric, and only use two shapes. At most one of the two shapes can be shared with the drawing.
• Step 4: Expose the print for 2 days. During that time, the print can be moved, and the photogram objects re-arranged.
• Step 5: Scan the final image.

I'll be setting up the first one of these experiments tonight, and exposing it tomorrow. I'm very excited to see how this works!

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!