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

Back to printing

Got back to printing full time in the darkroom this week. It feels like forever since I’ve been at it. Or at least forever since my intention was anything other than trying out a new script. Settled for now are the countless negative adjustments that have been driving me crazy since before the summer. For now, I’ve made my peace with the digital part of my old school process.

When I was at Rehoboth, a neighbor at the Art Show mentioned the Analog Photography Users Group. And he added that I wouldn't be eligible to join since I'm a hybrid. It startled me at first. I had no idea. A hybrid.

The gum bichromate process was developed in 1855 but my negatives are digital. Which reminded me of the two kinds of wet plate photographers. There's the Sally Mann types who let come what may and the other type that dress up in Civil War outfits. Photography is the most democratic of arts!

A few weeks ago I printed 3 negatives using a script that I thought might be pretty close to right. Prints from two out of three negatives were excellent. So with a vague sense of confidence, I launched 8 new negatives earlier this week using that same script. I’m not convinced I won’t continue to tweak but … honestly, I just had to move on and get back to making prints. Enough with the digits already.

As usual, the first few coats are used to build shadow detail and not much more.

Those negatives represent a couple of different series I’ve been putting together over time. 3 images are from Ireland, adding several new images from my 2012 trip there.

Also, a new series taken from my theater work with Manbites Dog Theater Company over the past 25 years. I’ve thought about gum printing a select few images for a while. I’m aiming for a dozen or so images that transcend their theater origin and speak to more universal human experience.

Starting to look like photographs

See my website:  woodsedge.net

My Big Beach Show Adventure

Got back yesterday from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware after participating in the Rehoboth Art League’s 40^th Annual Outdoor Fine Art and Fine Craft Show. I’d been in a couple of small, local tent shows here in Chapel Hill years ago but this was something of a different order.

The League is situated on a large, beautifully maintained lot only a few hundred feet from the ocean. You can’t see it or hear it, but you know the ocean is nearby. You see it in the sand-and-surf-tolerant plant life. You can feel it and smell it in the wind that blows through the pines, and grand oaks, and magnolias that shade the RAL estate. More colorfully, I experienced the ocean through the dress and mannerisms of the hundreds of beachcombers, both resident and vacationer, that paid $5 to walk through the show.

From the look of it, Rehoboth Beach draws a fairly wealthy crowd of folks. I won’t try to guess how many pairs of poodles both large and small that pranced past my tent. But there were more than I’d ever seen in a two-day period. Maybe ever.

Over 100 artists showed their work over the weekend – all under their own 10’ x 10’ white tents. For the most part, the work I saw was good or a little better. There weren’t as many fine and talented artists as I had hoped but there were enough. Most seem to make a life if not a living, travelling from place to place, weekend after weekend, selling their work at similar events.

I imagined them a band of gypsies pitching their treasure tents each weekend, selling their art, and then breaking camp to work in solitude throughout the week. And then packing up their work, their tent, their display boards, and hand outs, and driving to the next venue where they rejoin the tribe and do it all again.

To me they were friendly, serious folks and I enjoyed getting to know them the bit that I did. I say “the bit” because mostly, everyone stays tethered to their tent at these events to talk to visitors/hoped for buyers.

Gum prints aren’t that common so more often than not, whenever and wherever I show, the most frequent questions are “What is it,” and “How do you do it.” Occasionally there’s more -- aesthetics and art talk are always welcome -- but mostly people ask, “What is it” and “How do you do it.” The first question is easy enough to answer. People who ask that one just want to know if it’s a photograph.

But the second question is a real challenge: how to do justice to a printing process that is both arcane and seriously slow in the making without making it too long or complicated for the person asking the question. It’s a balancing act that I’m always modifying and tweaking.

And on that note, back from my big beach show adventure, I return to making new prints to show somewhere down the line.

See my website:  woodsedge.net

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