When I was working on my Master’s degree my focus was history of photography and alternative photographic processes. Basically, between 1840 and 1930 everything was an alternative process- it was ‘come as you are, pay as you go’, no standardization or cooperation. Cyanotype, salt print, wet plate, dry plate, daguerreotype- you get the idea.
Over the years I’ve tried most of them, actually mastered a few, and left the ones that use heated liquid mercury and “vapors of ether” in the past.
True story, the original film stocks of the 1910’s were made of cellulose fibers soaked in glycerin and coated with a silver nitrate solution. Everything about them was fine until it wasn’t. Especially with cinema films, which sat in metal coffins for decades in metal sheds in the deserts of California, time and heat broke the film down to its basic components, cellulose, glycerin, and nitrates, the basic components of dynamite. Accidently drop one of the reels and “bang- no soup for you.” In the 1930’s Kodak changed the formula and marked their new films as Kodak Safety Film- an indication that this film wouldn’t kill.
Anyway, I focused my masters work primarily on cyanotype and gum bichromate printing, mostly non-lethal processes. But the point that I’m not getting to is not about the process, but the subject- throughout my practice I used still life as my subject of choice. My first gum prints were small, printed directly from 4x5 negatives (which wouldn’t kill you). Gum prints are a labor of love, mixing pigment with gum arabic, sensitizing it with a solution of ammonium dichromate (which could). After sensitizing and exposing, the print is soaked in warm water and the gum slowly brushed away with a soft paint brush. Where the light passed through the negative and struck the gum (the shadow areas) it hardened into the paper and left an image. Where the negative was built up (the highlights) the gum washed away. When the print was dry the entire process had to be repeated three or four times without losing registration until the pigment finally reached Dmax (full density). Each print takes a couple days to complete but the resultant print is stunning- richly black, delicate, nuanced.
So for a couple years in the early 1990’s I was a still life photographer. And then I moved on, never really giving the genre much thought after that. Not really until December of 2020 when I saw an ad for an online still life class. It was the first winter of Covid and I was starved for things to do. I was also looking for a better way to teach my college classes about lighting. At the time I was teaching a B/W film course via Zoom and prerecorded video. Some elements of it weren’t too bad, and others were, you know, awful. Portraiture was my usual means of teaching lighting, but it didn’t work in this scenario. But after spending many hours myself on the course I purchased, it seemed still life did. It was fun. It took patience- no, taught patience, and returned the investment with an opportunity to have something truly unique.
The first semester I taught it, it went okay. I didn’t translate what I knew very well and the results were clumsy. I continued to work on it on my own for the next few months and reintroduced it to the next semester’s class. That went better. Students were engaged They found it fun. And as I went over my exemplars I saw something I liked in my work. A concentration I had lost, a proactive rather than reactive approach to picture-making, an engagement that hadn’t been part of my work for some time.
So this is what I do now. I make still life photographs. And I’ll continue to pursue this until I feel I’ve played it out. But I’m neither in a hurry nor anxious to see an end. Right now it’s just the way things are.