The beguiling negative.

     I should have known better.

     A few years ago, and for the first time since I made my very first gum print in 1991, I felt like I was really starting to get it. Really getting on top of the process. I thought about the old adage about mastery coming after 10,000 hours, or in my case, maybe after brushing out my ten thousandth layer of gum mixture. After all the ups and downs of working with the process, I felt like I was really in control. I was the boss of it, as children are wont to say.

     Ah, the pride before the fall…

     The gum process involves a complex cast of materials as well as a host of other physical variables that, when played out well, produce stunning photographic prints. Otherwise, it's not hard for gum prints to turn into a muddy mess. Like Demachy, the gum master, wrote: “No process under the sun…can be responsible for more complete inartistic effects than the gum bichromate process.”

     Ok, so a few years back I’m starting to feel really good about my printing. I’m playing with the variables in unprecedented ways from one coat to the next and I’m getting interesting, replicable results.

But there was one final frontier I wanted to conquer. I've never really felt that great about the negatives I work with. There’s a saying in the mountains of North Carolina, particularly around the ski slopes, that if you can ski NC slopes you can ski anywhere.

     I’m not a skier but I’m pretty sure that’s because the conditions are so lousy there that you learn lots of coping skills that really come in handy when you get on a decent slope in say, Vermont or Colorado.

What I'm saying is working with my negatives has made me a more skilled printer over the years

     Gum prints are contact prints. That means the negative is the same size as the finished print, hence the “contact." That's unlike a standard silver gelatin print that's made from a camera negative then placed in an enlarger in the darkroom and printed. With gum, there is no enlarger. So, I have to make an enlarged negative from the original negative if my finished print is going to be larger than 2 ¼” square, which is the size of most of the film I work with.

     Making that enlarged negative was tricky enough when I made them in the darkroom but about 7 or 8 years ago, the last large dimension duplicating film factory in the world had shut down and the possibility of continuing to make enlarged negatives in the darkroom using old school chemistry and all that that entails was coming to an end. I bought what I could find, but the end was clearly in sight.

I’d heard of digital negatives before then but only scoffed at the notion. But time and conditions can change a person. Dan Burkholder had written a book in 1999 called, Making Digital Prints for Contact Printing. I bought a copy and before long had purchased my first pack of Pictorico OHP. I’ve been wandering in the desert ever since.

See my website:  woodsedge.net