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

Is there anybody out there?

      My plan here is to write about the day-to-day life of a gummist. That's an old-school term for people like myself who are photographers that print their work using the gum bichromate process.

Gum prints develop out in trays of water. (Photo by Hope Zanes)

     Gum bichromate photography is a printing process that was developed in the 19^th century. Like a lot of my favorite things in life, it’s simple but it’s not easy. Mix three ingredients together, brush the mixture onto the prepared paper, attach a negative to the print and expose to sunlight. Anybody can do that, but most don’t bother. My experience teaching gum workshops is that many of those who do bother, don’t for long. “I love the results but it’s so slow, I wouldn’t have time, it’s too variable, it’s too… something.”
     I think it was 1991 when I made my first gum prints. But it was 1998 before I fully took the plunge. I've been at it ever since.
     This isn’t my first blog but it is my first intentionally public one. I kept one for the last year and a half of my mother’s life. She moved in with us April 2011 from her home in Charleston, SC where she’d been diagnosed with dementia maybe a year earlier.
     I photographed her often with the primary intention of sharing images with my 4 brothers and sisters, and other family members scattered throughout the country. (I’m just remembering now someone asking me back then if I would be photographing Mom’s decline, adding, “It’s become so cliché these days for photographers to photograph their dying parents.”)
     Huh. Imagine that.
     As a photographer, I knew photographs wouldn’t relay the full story of mom’s final days. I’d need to write about our time together as well. So the next question became how best to combine those two mediums to best tell the story?

     I could have sent text emails with photos attached. But separating words from images the way emails do would diminish the relationship those two mediums enjoy. I also could have created an InDesign newsletter that would allow me to truly weave the two together more appropriately, then save it as a pdf, and email that. But I figured there was a good chance it wouldn’t happen if it depended on all that. So in the end, the blog format, designed to easily incorporate photos and writing, provided a simpler, albeit more rigid, template-y way of getting at the presentation I wanted to send.
     I guess what I’m getting at is that that blog was intended for family members -- an audience with names and faces familiar to me and to my subject. The public posting part was irrelevant to me.
     This blog is different in that I’m not sure if there even is a target audience but I’m just putting it out there, anyway. Like when I used to spin records at the radio station back in college. You never really knew if anyone was listening.

See my website:  woodsedge.net