Christina Z Anderson's etched chemigrams

Anderson, Angel, etched chemigram, 10x8", edition 1/1, 2014

Christina Z Anderson has been an influential artist, educator, and author in the alternative photography arena for more than a decade.  You will recognize her name: it is woven into the very fabric of this blog in uncountable ways.  During most of this time her own creative work has centered on gum bichromates where her efforts have come to redefine the prevailing standards of technique in that exacting process, while permitting her at the same time to develop in her images very personal takes on home, family, memory and loss.  A sense of this substantial achievement can be seen on her website.

The news I have to report - and it is big - is that Chris is not just producing a lot of chemigrams these days, which up to now have been a sort of sideline with her, but etched chemigrams.  This method was first introduced in August 2014 at the end of our post on Leonor-Leigrano papers and in the accompanying comments.  To make an etched chemigram, you first have to make a chemigram itself.  In a way this is the larger challenge, to make something that has an intrinsic value worth destroying.  Not only does this require mental concentration, it also takes time, often a lot of it: Chris reports that some of her chemigrams take up to 6 hours to complete, a believable figure although we each work differently.  So after 6 hours is she ready to rip it apart in copper chloride, acetic acid and hydrogen peroxide?  It seems so, and we're indebted for her courage in this. 

In her series called 'Remnants' Chris applies the method to the emotions she felt on revisiting New Orleans recently, ten years after Katrina.  Stairways leading to ravaged houses, stoops smashed and scattered among the weeds, vacancy, despair, it's all here.  The starkness of the etched chemigram, with destruction of the image as premise, seems the perfect way to convey this.  And with her deep experience in mordançage after years of teaching it, Chris is finding this to be a natural fit.

Anderson, Wave, etched chemigram, 10x8", edition 1/1, 2014

Anderson, Stoop 3, etched chemigram, 8x10", edition 1/1, 2014

At times she dispenses with the chemigram form altogether (since how much good stuff can anyone want to destroy) and jumps right into the mysterious, pitiless world of bleach-etch without preamble.

Anderson, Stoop 5, mordançage, 8x8", edition 1/1, 2014

She brings to the enterprise considerable chops from a chemigram journey that shows no sign of ending.  The compulsive note-taking, the careful observations of paper reactions and toner compatibilities, sets a high bar for anyone wishing to enter the field and a model for those of us in it already.  One day we'd hope to publish a summary of her experiments.  Here's an example from a group of chemigram exercises on Adox Fineprint, using Krylon Crystal Clear acrylic spray as resist.  (Ventilate properly and wash hands after use; the MSDS can be found here.)

Anderson, Novel 1, chemigram, 8x10", edition 1/1, 2014

Incidentally, she finds selenium on Adox a wonderful toning choice, using it at the lower end of Fotospeed's dilution recommendations of 1+3.

But let us go back to the etched chemigrams of 'Remnants' for a moment.  In thinking about the power of these pictures - I do find them powerful, most of all Angel - I suspect it may derive from the gap the artist creates between an underlying reality (photograph of the scene, the house) which we know must have been there, somewhere, and the imagination of it as filtered through the mechanics of the chemigram prism, which in turn gets further deconstructed and scoured by a few exquisitely controlled strokes of bleach-etch.  The ruined house migrates and becomes part of our dream-world (the 'angel'), yet paradoxically - dreams are rife with paradox - a very tangible one, almost brutal.  It is this immediacy that elevates what had been a simple photograph far beyond what any photograph could do.

Thank you, Christina.

New books on methods

This has been a solid year for books and manuals aimed at the analog, experimental darkroom crowd (we'll call it that) and even though it's only August now might be a good time to sort through some of them - who knows, by year end we may see others.  Let's work through the pile.

For an English-speaking audience the most important and useful is Christina Z. Anderson's The Experimental Photography Workbook, 6th ed., 2012.  This is a complete revamping and expansion of her earlier editions, with an especially happy mix of contemporary topics: photograms, lumens, glassprints, pinhole, chemigrams, mordançage.  Sure, you have modern tintypes, bromoil, lith printing and so on, but the slant definitely favors what gets students and practitioners most excited these days, and Chris manages to convey that excitement with a step-by-step text and inspired examples by artists in the field, many of them former students. She gives lots of tips, hands-on insights on variants, a bit of history, and all the formulas you could want.  With Chris, you feel she not only has done all these techniques herself but that she actually loves each of them.  She has sacrificed for this book: her beloved gum bichromates are nowhere to be seen, but have been relegated to another book altogether due out next spring.  This is just as well.  In classrooms we used to use Christopher James' massive (1.8 kilos, 660 pp) Alternative Photographic Processes, 2nd ed., 2008, but no more.  The Experimental Photographic Workbook is snazzier, more to the point - and I think more to be trusted.  If you're crawling under the hood of modern analog methods this is the book to take with you.  Available from www.freestylephoto.biz.

In a different vein, we have Jalo Porkkala's sumptuously produced Köyhä Dagerrotyyppi, 2012, subtitled 'Alternative Photographic Processes' and available only in Finnish at the moment although a translation is planned.  Jalo says the best rendering of the title is 'A Poor Man's Daguerrotype' which refers to a silver plating or silvering-out process, but the book's contents are much more comprehensive than this would make you believe, with chapters on lith prints, lumens, toning, and a host of historic techniques like bromoils, anthotypes, ziatypes, cyanotypes, Vandyke browns, gumoils and gum bichromates as well as informative pages on chemicals, darkroom equipment, and safety precautions.  Anyone acquainted with Jalo's wonderful alt-photo blog Vedos knows how scrupulous he is about method, carefully recording results under different conditions before reaching conclusions and making recommendations; the same care is found here, and should set the bar for writing on photographic method.  If you can't wait for the English version, the book can be bought in Finnish at http://www.booky.fi.

Finally, Tom Persinger at f295 has come out with a slim volume called The f295 Historic Process Workbook, an easy-to-follow journey (if harder to do) through building a camera, preparing lenses, and everything you need to know about four historic processes: cyanotypes, salted paper, gum bichromates, and Vandyke browns.  Useful too are the sections on preparing a portfolio and writing a statement.  You can get it at www.freestylephoto.biz.

The iterative art of Brittany Nelson

Nelson, Mordançage2, 72x72", C-print, 2011

She started dismantling photographs around 2006, as a student of Christina Z. Anderson at Montana State.  She had lots of acid and copper chloride and hydrogen peroxide laying around, and stacks of photo paper, and a secret drive to be a mad scientist.  She continued at Cranbrook outside Detroit, in the MFA program.  Hmm - what if we just remove the silver gelatin emulsion from the paper?  What happens then?  And maybe re-stick it over here, on another piece of paper?  And then expose it to UV light, in increments?  Or maybe quench it in different redevelopers, for different times, and take notes on everything?

Welcome to the art of Brittany Nelson, featuring mordançage, or gelatin relief as some prefer to call it.  One of the few alt-photographic methods to have developed in the last century (along with chemigrams) rather than the previous one, it was mentioned at least as early as 1927 in Louis-Philippe Clerc's La Technique Photographique, but didn't receive much attention among fine-art photographers until Jean-Pierre Sudre rediscovered it in the 1970s.  While most applications have been possibly a bit too mundanely representational for Brittany's taste, she was pulled in by the endless possibilities for permutation of the variables, and for the pure physicality of the process.  You have to get very close to the materials for this kind of thing to work, and the bad part is they are largely poisonous.

Nelson, Mordançage3, 72x72", C-print, 2011

As a refresher, let us recall the basics.  A silver gelatin print is placed in a bath of copper chloride, glacial acetic acid, and hydrogen peroxide, which does several things at once: the print is bleached, the emulsion (mainly in the black areas) is gently loosened, and everything becomes soft, mushy and mobile, depending on the length of the soak, the H2O2 concentration, and so forth - some of Brittany's variables.  The CuCl2 acts as an etch and mordant, which has a further consequence of promoting color shifts upon re-immersion in developer.  At this point the image can be reorganized, the bleached areas can be left white or not, the options are many.  For an excellent overview see Anderson's page on unblinking eye, extracted from her essential Experimental Photography Workbook.  Jalo Porkkala has an outstanding bleach-etch page too on his Vedos site, where he runs you through actual examples of the possibilities, but one has the feeling that even he leaves off early, refusing any deep confrontation with materials at the exact moment where Brittany's odyssey begins. 

Nelson, Mordançage4, 72x72", C-print, 2011

What can we say of the images she has given us thus far in her young career?  It's as if they were lab reports from another planet, the result of tweaks of a strange parameter: wisps and banners of emulsion streaming and foaming, pointing to processes beyond our knowledge.   She goes to lengths not to be gestural, but in vain.  She is curious and obsessed and it shows.  The payoff is beautiful.

For more on Brittany, visit her website.  Notice too that, like others who work in mordançage (it's a niche activity, definitely) she scans her fragile, diaphanous work, to create the relative permanency of a digital file from which she makes chromogenic prints, truly monster ones.  New York would be fortunate to see these some day, and richer for it.