With no road trips planned, or any trips for that matter, I’ve been making photographs around the house and garden and printing them small, and in silver-gelatin. They’re just 4 x 4″ in size on 8 x 10″ paper, slightly selenium toned and matted to 8 x 10″ in 4-ply museum board.
My prints have always been fairly small, either 6 x 6″ or 7 x 7″, but I find myself being attracted to smaller prints more than ever before. I love Polaroid for its size, squareness and colour palette, and the Polaroids of directors Wim Wenders and Andrey (Andrei) Tarkovsky, cinematographer Robbie Müller and, in black and white, Patti Smith, I find mesmerising and were the reason I started working with Polaroid again. Other photographers and their work I’m revisiting are the IOWA images of Nancy Rexroth, more so for the prints than her choice of camera, and the work of Øyvind Hjelmen.
Although Minnesota recently had its first (far too early) snowstorm of 2020, the weather rebounded and we’ve seen some nice, mild temps lately. But, we all know what’s around the corner.
When the weather starts to get brutal in Minnesota, sea smoke can form when the air is much colder than the surface of a warmer body of water. This image was made on such a day at the Saint Anthony Falls, on the Mississippi River in Minneapolis.
Printed in silver-gelatin in an edition of just 10 prints, all are hand-printed by me in the darkroom, using the finest quality fiber papers and processed to meet archival standards. As with all previous Special Print offers, at the beginning of December, any remaining prints in the edition will revert to the regular (higher) print price.
• Edition: 10 • Medium: Silver-gelatin • Image Size: 5.75 x 8.00″ • Paper Size: 8.00 x 10.00″ • Paper: Foma Fomatone Glossy Fiber • Stamped, signed and numbered on verso • FREE domestic shipping via USPS Priority Mail, well-packed and with a tracking number.
This summer’s been a pretty good one, but school’s started and it’s time for show and tell!
In July we flew back to London to see our daughter graduate from Central St Martins with a degree in Fashion Journalism, while at the same time our son and his girlfriend were heading in the opposite direction to Denver, CO, to start new jobs. So proud of them all!
Thanks for the photo, Jo!
For the three weeks that I was in the U.K., London was in the middle of a heatwave. I’m well old enough to remember the heatwave of ’76, which is the summer everyone compares hot weather to, but this was far hotter in my mind. Most days were in the mid-80s with a few in the low 90s. And remember, buses, tubes, houses and flats aren’t air-conditioned… But it was a good trip, seeing lots of friends, lots of museums and galleries and having so much fun staying with our daughter and her boyfriend in their new flat.
There were several outstanding photography shows — Vanessa Winship and Dorothea Lange, both at The Barbican, Tacita Dean’s Landscape at the Royal Academy and The Shape of Light at Tate Modern. A small show of work by C.R.W. Nevinson, Prints of War and Peace, at The British Museum commemorates his gift of 25 prints to the museum in 1918. They span his time in the trenches of Flanders as a war artist during World War I, as well as prints of New York, Paris and London.
C.R.W. Nevinson — Looking Through Brooklyn Bridge, New York, 1921, Drypoint
Ed Ruscha — Parking Lot series
Alison Rossiter — Gevaert Gevaluxe Velours
After three weeks of family, friends, art and walking, all sustained by copious amounts of flat whites, I returned to Minneapolis and went straight into teaching a week-long polymergravure workshop at Highpoint Center for Printmaking. And if that wasn’t enough, the following week I was teaching Kerik Kouklis the process. Kerik travelled to Minneapolis from California especially for a one-day, one-on-one workshop, at the end of which he had made 3 perfect plates and about a dozen prints!
If you’re interested in learning the process, sign up for my infrequent email newsletter for details of upcoming workshops.
Here’s a behind the scenes video with Jae Gutierrez, Senior Photograph Conservator at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. I was fortunate to be able to spend some time with Jae back in September, when I visited the CCP Print Room with friends as part of Depth of Field. She was incredibly helpful and answered in depth all the questions I had about silver prints, platinum prints, gravures, my workflow and the presentation of my work, and reassured me that I was following the best practices. I got the two thumbs up from the conservator!
But there’s one little trick she showed me that I immediately started to use. Apologies if this is known by most, but remember, I spend my life in the dark(room).
When I attach my images to the Museum board backing I use my own mounting corners that I make out of Tyvek paper, which is strong and archival, and I attach them with Filmoplast P90 Plus tape. This is the result of running out of the correct size self-adhesive Mylar corners late on a Friday night too many times. Also, it’s much easier and the prints feel more secure. But when using the Mylar corners you have to flex the print to remove or replace it; not good when you’re handling an Edward Weston print, for example. By attaching the corners a specific way, as Jae showed me, you can avoid all that. Simple!
Here’s a wonderful call for work organised by Rfotofolio and judged by Houston gallery owner and director Catherine Couturier.
The INPrint call for entry puts the focus on the final product of the artist vision, the photographic print or object, not the jpeg on the screen. Rfotofolio wants to encourage and promote the art of making the photographic print.
This call for entries will be judged not only on the image, but by the craft, skill, and quality of presentation.
All media are welcome, including but not limited to traditional film, digital, collage, three-dimensional, encaustic, small books, and alternative processes.
