https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB1cFw0-2KY
- Black and white because you can do it yourself, learning wet techniques. As soon as you photograph anything and take away the color, make it monochrome it suddenly becomes abstract. It amazes how we accept monochrome as true.
- As a photographer you have more creative freedom in black and white.
- Removing color information creates an abstract impression of the world.
- 8x10 Deardoff
- Pre-visualisation is the key to any creative expression
- Carbon printing? - Explore. Make your own charcoal and use it as printing process - imperfections
- Indian ink and gelatin coated paper - carbon paper - sensitize with potassium dichromate - sensitive
- Place negative over the paper and contact print
- Light bites gelatin and tans it - gelatin dissolves at 37degrees, if you stop it harden it with light it will stick and stay. - Gelatin is collodion.
- Unique print one off printing paper
- Gelatin image then transferred onto metal/paper/glass/paper/cotton rag
- Heat water to 37 degrees and black mess emerges - peel like a polaroid transfer
- Beautiful
Explores nature and landscape.
Connection with the subject matter - Slow down, connect, feel part of the landscape
The concept is carbon to carbon, 2 elements to concept, philosophical or environmental or both.
Catalyst was can I use part of the image to make the image.
These photographs of trees are made from carbon dust from the trees themselves. The images explore an organic cycle using a traditional process, hence ‘Carbon to Carbon’. 8 x10 inch negatives were made to produce these prints. The blacks within each print were produced with a formula of Indian ink and ground charcoal.
My ‘photo-charcoal prints’, as I like to call them, aim to encapsulate the beauty and vulnerability of our forests as I see them. The unpredictability of carbon dust embedded in each print has created a unique tonal scale that I can never repeat. This, perhaps, makes each print as individual and fragile as the woodland that I have chosen to photograph.
Place is becoming a recurring theme in the photographs work which is inspiring me...