Sizing

There are a lot of variables in gum printing, a lot of ways to manipulate your final image. Some serve to benefit the finished print and some do not. Controlling those variables is one of the keys to good printing. The one that starts the ball rolling one way or the other is sizing.

Sadly, frustratingly, it’s also been the most confounding over the years. How well I’ve done these past couple of weeks will have everything to do with the quality of my prints in the coming year.

Sizing doesn’t mean measuring the paper. It means preparing the surface of the paper before printing on it. Most gum prints, including all of mine, are made on paper designed for print makers and watercolorists. Using those papers un-sized, the image will sink into the fibers of the paper. Staining becomes a real issue as well.

A properly sized paper keeps the image and all its detail on the surface of the paper and prevents staining as well. Even factory-made, store-bought paper is sized. Starch, egg whites, and gelatin are the most common materials used. But for the gum process, which tends to be pretty rough on paper, only gelatin is hard enough to withstand the abuse.

Sizing isn’t that great a job. More like a necessary evil.

With print side up, the paper is drawn carefully over the top edge of the vat.

Once a year, in the summer, I mix up 2 pounds of gelatin powder in 8 gallons of distilled water and heat to 125 degrees. Then 48 sheets of 22” x 30” paper are inserted into the bath and then removed from the bath and hung to dry. (The screen porch allows 6 rows by eight sheets, 48 in all.)

That process is repeated two more times on subsequent days depending on the weather and other circumstances. On the last day, 37% formaldehyde is added to a more diluted gelatin bath to harden the surface of the paper further and protect it from growing tiny life forms.

A gas mask is used on formaldehyde day.

All of that usually takes three or four days but I’m sizing a little more than twice as much as usual this year and that has really stretched the time uncomfortably close to Autumn. I had hoped it would all be done by now but the weather turned on me a couple of days ago. It has been a little too breezy and cool but tomorrow is supposed to be a little warmer.

Gelatin left in the vat overnight and scooped into the cooking pot.

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