Chemigrams in Tuscany

chemigram (as photogravure)

A guest post by Franco Marinai

Chemigrams are images produced on photosensitive material by light and photographic chemicals.  They require no camera, no negative, no enlarger or darkroom.  In fact, you make a chemigram in daylight.  You can make it outdoors in the sun if you like, or in the shade of olive trees.

In Serrazzano, a hilltop village in Tuscany not far from Volterra, I make them in an old stable that we have restored to accommodate a printmaking workshop and a photographic darkroom.  In good weather - and it is often quite good - I work outside, in the courtyard of Villa Beltrami, the manor house, or in the piazza inside the medieval walls.

Serrazzano

the courtyard

the piazza

If we speak of the chemigram as a process, we might say that it is all about the action of photographic chemicals, fixer and developer, on the emulsion of photographic paper - or on photographic film, which I favor in my own work.  It results in a unique artifact that, if successful, yields mesmerizing and otherworldly imagery like no other photographic or alternative photographic process.  You have no doubt had occasion to study chemigrams throughout this blog; if you care to see a few examples of my own work transforming chemigrams to photogravure, click here or here.

The ancient hills around Serrazzano are rich in minerals, and in earlier times provided the semi-precious stones that embellished the furniture of the lavish villas of the Medicis.  Nowadays mining is no longer pursued, but the geological wealth of the region still can be seen in the stones used in all varieties of local construction.  The patterns in them inspire me, and are often reflected in my chemigram images.

local stones

chemigram (as photogravure)

the darkroom

While some have compared a chemigramist to a poet taking risks, tinkering with lines (the dark are developed lines, the light are fixed lines), I like to think that making a chemigram is a performance.  It is a lively performance that features invention and discovery, surprises and screw-ups.  The performer must plan, and also be ready to improvise and deal with chance.  She needs a good dose of luck, a cool head, and the presence of mind to make decisions such as when or if to move the emergent chemigram from one bath to another, or whether to use hot water, or change the temperature of the chemicals or their concentration.

When the performance is over - after a few minutes (rarely), several hours, or even a whole night - the result is a unique object, a chemigram, which is a detailed record of that very same performance.  That's because at close examination a chemigram reveals how it came about.  In fact, with some experience, one can tell which outline came before another or which shape preceded another.  So a chemigram is complete picture of its own history, a remarkable two-dimensional representation of the motion of time.

chemigram (as photogravure)

Time is felt everywhere in Serrazzano, and not only in chemigrams: its quiet, steady passing is present in the very earth, the walls, and the ancient buildings.  Serrazzano is first mentioned in a document from the eleventh century, but its origins go back to Etruscan times more than a thousand years earlier.  After a day spent making chemigrams, I like to relax with a drink on the terrace and idly muse on things, or I may choose to get out and explore the bounty of the region, the profusion of grapes, olives, and mushrooms, in the same way Julius Caesar must have done when his legions marched through here in the first century before Christ, heading towards Gaul.  Did they prepare the way for chemigrams?

the terrace

the olive trees

the sheep

an abandoned olive oil mill

TwoCentsPress - Printmaking in Serrazzano is a project to give fellow artists the opportunity to work and live in an extraordinary setting at a very reasonable price.  The project includes accommodations within the historic castle of Serrazzano and 24/7 access to a workshop fully equipped for all intaglio techniques and a darkroom for B&W and alternative photographic processes.  Set in an unspoiled corner of Tuscany, surrounded by pristine and protected forests, it is the perfect place for an artist to concentrate and recharge.  It will provide you with an exceptional experience that you will treasure and wish to return to time and time again.

Visit us online at www.twocentspress.com or on instagram at twocentspress.  You can reach me directly at info@twocentspress.com.  Ciao!

Franco's chemigrams on ortho litho film: a new path?

Marinai, untitled, 2015

Franco Marinai creates photogravures on copper plates, an older, uncompromising process in which it can take weeks to pull an acceptable print.  That kind of dedication is at the heart of his artistic practice, which has been discussed here before.  Few have the discipline or the skill to do it anymore, and he is part of a very select community.

But it so happens that sometimes, instead of starting with a photograph (his photography is highly regarded), he will fashion a chemigram - from scratch and on the fly - and he does this on the same orthochromatic litho film he uses as a route to photogravures, subjecting it to the same cycle of fixer and developer baths.  He has to be in the mood for it, and it's infrequent, but it does occur.  I try to be nearby when he's tempted.

This past December he found himself in one of these moods.  Working in daylight, he cut two 7" x 11" sheets from a pack of Arista Ortho Litho Film that he buys from Freestyle (their link is on the right-hand sidebar).  

litho film from Freestyle, Los Angeles

He applied the same resist to each, in this case a pleasant, dabbed-on pattern of Elmer's glue, the standard polyvinyl acetate based glue used in schools and by hobbyists and children worldwide.  He let it dry overnight to get it good and hard.  (Chemigramists will recognize this as one of the commonest of soft resists, and many won't let it dry at all but plunge it promptly into chemistry in a matter of seconds.  Methods do vary.)

Next he took the two sheets of film, now resist-coated, and sent them off simultaneously in different directions, one in a fixer bath, the other in undiluted Dektol.  He calls this his 'separate at birth' routine and he often follows it as it leads to the strongly graphic results he favors, particularly when he amps up the contrast during the itinerary of each.  Here you have the two trays at the outset:

Each film starts in the opposite chemistry

The films were switched back and forth in normal chemigram fashion with occasional rinsing in between, over a period of several hours, for by then the resists had completely eroded away.  But what is surprising from such a meticulous worker as Franco, who I've known for years, is that the steps were just as often done without rinsing at all: the contamination of the two baths at times was sought, in a maneuver he has called, with a nod to Nietsche, 'Dionysian',  meaning wild, exultant, partaking of the mysteries.  Well, mysteries he got. 

Marinai, untitled, 2015

Marinai, untitled, 2015

This last one is worth lingering over.  You'll notice the left and right sides look different - in fact the right side looks as if it were dunked in developer from the start, while the left looks, hmm, a bit mixed.  This is true.  The left side was immersed only a few inches into fixer at the start, then quickly went into developer, then back into fixer a ways further, i.e. a few more inches, and so on, so that only by degrees did the entire left side come to share in the chemigram experience equally.

What is the fate then of these rich, gorgeous films?  They get turned into photogravures, that's what, printed in black ink on printmaking paper.  But all is not lost: no longer needed for their primary job, the films themselves are preserved and live on in Franco's archives; he has hundreds of them.  And with some he plays around further still, as in the one below where he has done a bleach-etch (note the veils) and on top of that has laid some hand coloring with gold varnish in a kind of go-for-broke flourish you can only do at the end of a long work week.

Marinai, The Golden Age, 2015

I'm going to tell you something else about Franco.  Every morning, weather permitting, he goes out jogging along the mighty East River just a few blocks from his lower Manhattan home.  Jogging is a grueling sport and for some it's a time to think about things, take your mind off your legs and lungs.  Franco thinks about the darkroom.  The day he made the chemigrams above he'd looked over his shoulder and snapped a picture of the river with his phone, just a record of his thoughts.  Here it is, in its bleakness, fog and power, a reminder.

Marinai, East River, 2015

 

Chemigram to photogravure (for printmakers)

figure 1

(Franco Marinai sends a guest post)

I do my chemigrams on 8x10" high contrast orthochromatic film, not on photo paper, since I will port them to photogravures when I'm finished. I use undiluted Golden varnish, bleach, Dektol, fixer, warm and cold water.  The transparency of the film allows me to reproduce the chemigram on a copper plate and ultimately ink it, wipe it, and print it on a high-pressure press as an intaglio print, thereby giving me the three dimensionality and subtle tactility of an etching.  But I will do this following the more demanding photogravure process, which is best known for the elegance of its continuous tone reproduction and its exceptionally intense blacks.  This will ensure fidelity to the mesmerizing graphic qualities of the chemigrams.

Fig. 1 shows the final rinse of an 8x10" chemigram on orthochromatic film.  I use hard water, rich in magnesium and calcium cations, from the well in the square outside my studio in Serrazzano, Italy.  Serrazzano is a small medieval village on a hilltop 25 miles south-west of Volterra.

figure 2

Here (fig. 2) the transparencies have been cut and masked in preparation for the gelatin exposure in the vacuum frame.  The chemigram of the one on the left was started with immersion in bleach, while the one on the right started with Dektol.

figure 3

After the gelatin has been exposed, transferred to the copper plate, and developed in warm water, the plate is covered with a fine layer of rosin (aquatint) and readied for etching (fig. 3).

figure 4

The plates have been etched for twenty minutes in ferric chloride (fig. 4) and cut to the size of the transparencies (7x10").

figure 5

This is the first proof of the two plates: Side By Side (2013).  Typically I print an edition of six plus an artist's proof.  Here are a few more photogravures, all printed from individual plates and produced using the same technique.

Marinai, They Do Not Think The Same, 2013

 

Marinai, Comics, 2013

I can be reached through my website, www.marinai.com, or you can post comments below.  For a detailed discussion of the photogravure process, visit Lothar Osterburg's site.

                                                                                                                       - Franco Marinai

The great tangent of Nino Migliori

(Franco Marinai, the New York-based photographer and printmaker, has written a guest post.  We are happy to make the space available to him.)

Migliori, oxidization, 1948

It's 1948 - a momentous year - and the world is reeling from the disasters of WWII.  The future is uncertain but in the relative obscurity of a darkroom in central Italy, a young photographer boldly sets off in two seemingly different directions: realism and experimentation.

As a neorealist photographer he would document Italy's transition from an agricultural to an industrial society with B&W essays that gained him considerable notoriety.

As an experimenter he would turn out to be a dedicated and steadfast destroyer of photographic conventions.  Over the years he oxidized, cut, wrecked, scratched, burnt, and otherwise abused film, photographic paper, polaroids, and cliché-verres alike.  This landed him squarely in the Italian pantheon of the photographic avant-garde (informal wing).

Migliori, oxidization, 1954

That the two practices could live together shouldn't be a surprise.  It's certainly not a case of split personality.  They are rather two aspects of the desire to get to the bottom of things, to get concrete, in other words to visualize reality, whether it has to do with some kids in the streets of Naples or with some unorthodox chemical reaction on photographic paper.

Nino Migliori started off his informal journey producing "oxidizations" - abstract images obtained off-camera by plying photographic paper with fixer and developer.  They have an uncanny kinship with what later - in 1956 - would be called a "chemigram" by Pierre Cordier, its legitimate father.

The interplanetary alignment ends there.

Migliori, oxidization, 1954

Nino Migliori kept on a tangent - so to speak - to produce "pyrograms", "watergrams", "celluloid-grams", "photograms", "cliché-verres" and much more.  It's a large and varied body of work that speaks loud for Migliori's unrelenting enthusiasm and voracious curiosity.  In fact, the gist of his experimental work seems more about unrestricted dabbling than anything else.  And this may be its strength.  But given the volume and the nature of the images housed in innumerable museums and private collections in Europe and the US, one wonders whether he had any rejects.  Did he discard any?  And this may be another of Nino Migliori's strengths.

                                                                                                 -  Franco Marinai

The stars stop moving, but the earth still turns

Marinai, 2012

Franco Marinai continues his epic program of deconstructing our ideas of time and its portrayal that he first showed us in March of this year with his groundbreaking work in color chrono-photography.  He is closing in on his goal of isolating the fixed point of time, its fulcrum.  By scaling back to a black-and-white representation, his current strategy, he is able to abstract motion and therefore time yet further, reducing it to what amounts to a spare, defining beauty of pure marks and markers.  It doesn’t help to know that underlying these are trivial or prosaic acts like walking, climbing steps, eating, biking.  Forget that he uses a medium format camera modified with the addition of a variable speed motor.  Forget even that he uses a camera at all.  These marks are gestures for both the unraveling of time, and for its concentration.  They are black holes, and like all black holes they command our acute attention.   

Marinai, 2012

Marinai, 2012

Marinai, 2012

Marinai, 2012

Franco is in the process of collecting these images, numbering almost 100, into a limited-edition book of photogravures for which he will undertake the monumental task of printing himself from copper plates in his Manhattan studio. It will be entitled The Motion of the Wheel and Other Spins.  Those interested may contact him directly at www.marinai.com for further details.

The chronophotographs of Franco Marinai

Marinai, 2011

When the cascades of color fall away - soon they will - these tendrils of red, blue, silver, ochre - you say to yourself: this is all about movement, but it is deafeningly still, there is no movement, it has ended or is about to begin but it is not here - and yet here it is, everywhere.

1

Marinai, 2011

In the luminous pictures of Franco Marinai, we have stepped across a boundary of perception.  Instants of motion are deconstructed, splintered, laid out under the delta-t of our calculus.  These runners from the NYC Marathon of 2011 offer their bodies to a surrealist vision of malleable flesh, against freeze-frame streaks of background.  From these nightmare slices, it is for the viewer to intuit and recompose a human reality.  In an earlier period this would be a task for the gods, but times have changed.  There are newer truths.

Marinai, 2011

Franco's inspiration may be in his blood.  His city of Florence has produced others who have wrestled with making depictions of the kinetics of real life - Leonardo da Vinci is one who comes to mind.  Toward the end of the 19th century Etienne-Jules Marey invented the chronophotograph and coined the word for it; borrowing from him, Muybridge contributed his famous images of horses and runners.

Marey, Pelican, ca. 1882

But it was in Italy, home of Fiat and Ferrari, that ideas of speed and motion found their most fertile reception.  The futurist movement in art developed there, in the urgent, stacatto-filled works of Boccioni, Marinetti, Balla and others, drawing connections between perception and the new world of machinery.

Balla, 1913

 

Berkeley had said esse est percipi, everything is sense; the Italians taught us to practice it.  The confounding thing about time however - and this is the great paradox implicit in Franco's photography, made possible by his own technical prowess - is that when you chop it up into smaller and smaller bits, it seems to stand still.  Thus there is an immense quietude in his work, a beautiful calm that resides at the heart of motion.  He has discovered this.  It is not too much to think that Da Vinci would understand.

Technical note:  Franco works with a modified medium format Bronica SQ-A camera shooting Velvia Fujichrome film.  His website is www.marinai.com.