Edgar Hartley's ceremonies of chemigram magic

Hartley, The Warding, on Adorama FB, 2018

If you see a very tall gentleman striding down West 40th Street in Manhattan whispering mantras to himself in an Asiatic language, possibly a dead one, it's most certainly Edgar Hartley, known also as Upasaka Bodhisattva, absently preparing himself for a day's work in the darkroom.  When I first knew him this was not on the program: he was mainly concerned then with the devising of warding sigils, amulets and protective seals for the summoning and healing of spirits - a specialized occupation to be sure - but in recent years he has transitioned smoothly into printmaking and cameraless photography.  Are the two related, wards and prints?  In his hands they most certainly are.  In fact you probably can't truly appreciate the accomplishment of his new show, Grinding Iron Rods Into Needles, at Manhattan Graphics, February 1 to February 28, without seeing how they inform and interpenetrate one another.  I'll let you explore those connections on your own since I admit my scant knowledge of the magick arts, yes that's a 'k', my loss to be certain.  Come to the opening reception Saturday, February 16 to meet the artist and discuss your sigils with the Bodhisattva himself.

For those unfamiliar with Tang dynasty chengyu, or idioms, it's helpful for starters to shed light on the show's title.  The story goes that one day in the 9th century young Li Bai encountered an old woman by a stream.  She was beating an iron rod between two stones.  What are you doing, Li Bai asked.  I'm beating this iron rod into a needle.  Let me try, he said, and he tried for a minute or two and gave up, saying this is crazy.  No it's not, the woman said.  If you keep doing it again and again, you will eventually have a needle, it's all about perseverance.  Li Bai left her and thought about this, and later would become the greatest poet in the history of China.

So much for background.  Let's turn to the work and see what we can learn from it.

Hartley, Chronos, on Ilford Warmtone FB, 2018

On Chronos, pictured here, Edgar has used several resists that have become popular of late (cf. our post last month on soft resists) including guava paste and oil spray.  Soluvar by Liquitex was the hard resist, and he used varying amounts of stabilizer, or ammonium thiocyanate, on this and all the other darkroom pieces in the show.  I suspect he may have dampened the warmtone here with a bit of selenium, judging from the sober quality of the red, although he's mum on that.  For The Warding at the top, Soluvar and tape were the resists (no guavas there) but the major difference lies in his use of bleach-etch methods, a newer tool in his box, to soften the surface and give it a suitably sensuous effect.

Hartley, Shi Tou, on Ilford Warmtone FB, 2018

Hartley, Untitled, on Fomatone Classic 132 Mat MG VC FB, 2018

Hartley, Your Phenomena Is Not My Phenomena II, on Adorama FB GL, 2018

To create the Fomatone image the artist used both brush and tape, although the dominant gestures arise clearly from bleach-etch, as they do also in Your Phenomena, where the hard resists, MSA Varnish by Golden and Soluvar by Liquitex, are barely perceptible however past the veils of floating emulsion.

As Edgar tends to work on small format paper, for a show like this, where most of the pictures are 16 x 20 inch C-prints, hi-resolution scanning can play an important role in how things get viewed and loved by the public.  David at Print Space, West 21st Street, stepped in and scanned the originals at 1600 dpi and some even as high as 2400 dpi, and then did all the printing on Kodak Endura.  You won't want to miss seeing the results.

It's only fair to add that this show includes an assortment of other printmaking endeavors by the Bodhisattva: paper litho, collagraphy, photogravure, etching, even silkscreen.  But you know why we aren't talking about them.  His website is www.edgarhartley.com.

Young Li Bai and the Old Woman

Denis Brihat

Brihat, Lichen, oxidation, 40x50 cm, 1975

Denis Brihat, once you see his work in person, and you really must - there's no other way to appreciate it - never leaves that part of your brain that thinks about photography.  Even when you're right up into it, even when you're literally breathing on his immaculately sculpted surfaces, you have to persevere to truly comprehend it.  How can it be so intense and focused, yet so delicate?

His subjects, they are simple: flowers, fruits, and vegetables from the garden outside his back door in the south of France - but it's then that you realize you've never seen these subjects quite in this way before.  They are transformed.  The poppies, spurges, dandelions, onions and lichens are as if touched by a hand and an eye that believes unreservedly in them, that wants nothing more than to give to these humble organisms underfoot a merited reverence in the pantheon of nature.  He places them at center stage, rendering them an austere homage.  And Denis, in ways substantially unchanged, working slowly at the rhythm of the change of seasons in the country, has been doing this for more than forty years.  His accomplishment is extraordinary.

Brihat, Lichen, photographic etching, 13x18 cm, 1981

Brihat, Wild Carrot Blossom, photographic etching, 50x60 cm, 1988

Brihat, Slice of Kiwi, iron toning, 50x60 cm, 1990

Brihat, Crumpled Poppy, gold toning, 30x40 cm, 1994

Brihat, Heart of Buttercup, sulfuration, 40x50 cm, 1999

Brihat, Yarrow Blossom, photographic etching, 10x15 cm, 1970

Brihat, Heart of Poppy, selenium and gold toning, 40x50cm, 2000

His pictures start life on black and white photo paper, but he often modifies the images through toning, beginning with selenium and marching through a fair list of the transition metals, well known for their ability to form colored compounds: gold, iron, vanadium, copper.  He also has developed his own method for treating images with sulfur compounds, which he calls sulfuration.  At its simplest, think of silver sulfide, which if left on an image after incomplete washing will produce a brownish cast.  You can arrive at sulfiding by using sodium sulfate, thiourea, or other materials, and by adjusting temperature, agitation, and concentration you may wind up, if you wish, with some nice sepia tones.  If you're new at this, try The Photographer's Toning Book (2003) by Tim Rudman, which has all the information you'll need.  Of course when Denis was starting out he didn't have that, and had to discover methods on his own.  Still, some of the books of a general nature from that earlier era remain incomparable - I'm thinking of Pierre Glafkides' Chimie et Physique Photographiques (1976, 4th ed.), which very likely inspired him in his researches.

So from the beginning, in the 1960s, Denis found himself engaged in a private, unremitting dialog with the silver gelatin of the photographic emulsion.  The primacy of silver was overthrown; in its place other metals were given their say.  Soon he began to question the place of gelatin itself.  He and his friend Jean-Pierre Sudre, similarly motivated, studied early reports on the manipulation of gelatin and gained insights from clues widely scattered over the literature.  A researcher at Kodak in England named A. Marriage had published in the British Journal of Photography (1944) a description of a way to excoriate the gelatin wherever silver grains had formed while leaving the white areas untouched, and with this in mind, or ideas very much like this, the pair embarked on a long course of experimentation, trading ideas and results over many Provençal dinners.  In time they chose what worked best and settled on a methodology, Brihat naming it 'grignotage' while Sudre favored 'mordançage'.  They shared an approach: copper chloride, hydrogen peroxide, and acetic acid, and each took it in a direction in tune with their vision.  [A modern practitioner is Brittany Nelson some of whose work can be seen in a blogpost here.]

from a retrospective in Campredon, 2012

a nook in the studio

Denis Brihat

Eventually, for Denis, the surface of a picture which had been treated with this new process - for convenience and for now we shall call the process 'bleach-etch', a name given to it by some of the first researchers - was suggestive of the acid-biting of an etching on a copper plate, with its reliefs and depressions.  He dropped 'grignotage' (nibbling) and renamed it 'gravure photographique' or photographic etching.  He liked the feeling of a third dimension, the feeling that, in a small way, it approached sculpture; it seemed to validate the notion that these fruits and flowers exist within the world, not on a flat surface, that the depth (however small) gives them the power they deserve.  Several pictures above use the technique, although the evidence is hard to demonstrate unless the reader is already intimately familiar with the technique's capablities and limitations - a large subject best left for another time.  In the hands of Denis Brihat, a consummate craftsman as well as artist, the telltale signs are concealed by his rigorously controlled redeveloping after bleach-etch, and perhaps by his fiddling with his beloved metal salts.

We are thus led back to our point of departure, that this work must really be seen to be appreciated.  You could say this of much that is great, but this time we insist.   In Paris his dealer is Galerie Camera Obscura.  In New York it is the Nailya Alexander Gallery.

Nikolova's method

Eva Nikolova, Untitled III, 2016

For a long time now I've wanted to get down into the trays with Eva Nikolova, and I know I'm not alone in this.  Folks have been writing me, stopping me in the street - ever since we began publishing her tortured paeans to memory, loss, and deracination, first in our post in 2013 and another in 2015 - to ask how she makes these pictures.  Some of the early ones looked like drawings with a smudge of chemigram thrown in, here and there, for mood, like Edmund Teske used to do in the 1960s in his faux-heroic portraits of Kenneth Anger, yet they were always beautifully and confidantly executed, charting a path of moral witness totally without precedent in cameraless photography.  When we noticed there were no people in these pictures (for even conventional war-zone photos coming to us from Aleppo had people in them, or their ghosts, adrift in the ruins) we grew to realize that here it was the artist herself who was the lone survivor of her particular armageddon, the one with the tale to tell, she who would live to imprint it with the human stamp.

detail, Untitled III

detail, Untitled III

Her methods have matured and will continue to do so, but her project remains.  This past summer she embarked on a series called 21 Fragments of Yesterday and Tomorrow, one of which, Untitled III,  was a selectee in the recent Alternative Process Photo Competition at Soho Photo in New York.  We decided to investigate what goes into making these pictures, just how they are formed.  Unsurprisingly, it turns out they begin as drawings (we were right), but the tools she is using now are chosen with a view toward a bleach-etch and glassprint endgame, so that as she works, photographic constraints and opportunities are forefront in her mind.  It's best to let her tell it.

'I start on a medium-weight drawing paper using graphite, charcoal, white chalk, and thin sharpies, often overlaid with a cross-hatch of white gel pens and maybe even a touch of white oil pastel.  I like to mix different materials when I draw, but because the visible tones of the materials do not coincide with their opacity - this is what matters when making a negative to print from - I photocopied the drawing onto ordinary printer paper, then contact-printed it under the enlarger.'

Since the resulting print had plenty of blacks, it was easy for her to bleach-etch, most apparent in the dramatic upper part of the picture.  The reader may wonder why the blacks in the lower part didn't bleach-etch as well and the answer lies largely in her strategy of mixing tones in the original drawing, that dense cross-hatch of white and black lines that she spoke about.  She articulates it so well: 'What preserves some of the blacks from lifiting off are tiny islets of white that act as anchors.'

Because the black areas therefore were impure, the etch was insufficient to affect them to any great extent.  Furthermore, she brushed on developer to these areas after the first etch to solidify the blacks found there.  For the upper part of the picture, the sky, now dense with veils, she delicately applied a weak and contaminated developer in an effort to bring out color, then left it to redden in the summer sun.

There is a lot to admire here for practitioners, and to learn from.  And we haven't begun to speak of the impact of her work on a viewer, which can be altogether staggering.

Contact the artist at her site, www.evanikolova.com for more information.

Why etched chemigrams?

Collins, etched chemigram 71914-5, 2014

This is a story about my journey from simple photogenic drawings to chemigams and finally to etched chemigrams - these latter have been mentioned a couple of times in the blog recently and have caused a small stir.  I hope this may be of interest to some of you.  Consider it a response.

I began making chemigrams - of a sort that didn't have a name - about ten years ago, on a day like this one in the middle of an endless summer when I was fiddling around with my trays in the darkroom, bored with books and friends, just looking to pass the time.  I knew nothing of the modern history of what I found myself doing and didn't care; in due course I would correct that, but for now I was simply lost at play.

I had seen, of course, a lot of abstract photography of the twentieth century, I was not naive.  Coburn, Moholy-Nagy, Bruguiere, Kepes, Hajek-Halke were on my shelf, and I was spending a fair amount of time making and thinking about glassprints, those black-and-white pictures created on transparent material and contact-printed under an enlarger which have recently figured in this blog - and will do so again.  And so it was that, like many before me, I stumbled onto the chemigram method by chance.  I didn't know even that it had rules and methods, predecessors, active giants in the field, a history; so in my ignorance I kept exploring it to its perceived limits and stopped, dazzled like an early explorer on the verge of some dark continent, and not a little scared too.

I researched it - surely someone must have come this way before.  Soon I found a man living in Belgium named Pierre Cordier who claimed to have invented chemigrams, or perhaps discovered them depending how inherent you believe chemigrams are to the world.  Incredibly, he'd been making chemigrams for half a century; it was he who had bestowed on them a name, created a doctrine of method, and was their most fervent apostle.  I climbed on a plane and was off to visit him.

Collins, etched chemigram 72814-2, 2014

In my suitcase I carried some chemigrams which I thought represented me and where I was at fairly well, but as a neophyte I wasn't sure I exactly wanted to show them to Cordier.  But he turned out to be the most generous, warm-hearted person imaginable and we quickly become great friends, chattering away days and nights about one thing or another concerning art and - yes - the rest of life (if there is any).  And I will say this: Pierre taught me a lot and I listened.  In due course I was making chemigrams strongly influenced by his teaching (much is contained in his book, The Chemigram, Editions Racine, Brussels, 2007) and this is still the method I use in my workshops - for me it remains the classic approach.

The use of resists as a first step was key, a major innovation that, as a printmaker and etcher, I grasped immediately.  The search for newer and better resists, or ones with special characteristics, began to consume me; tests were conducted, emails fired off, comparisons made; early posts to this blog in 2010 attest to that, and this endures as an important area of investigation.  Today, chemigramist Matt Higgins in Australia is at the forefront of that effort.

Other critical issues also occupied us.  How to plan the incisions that you make in the resist, which cut to make first, then second and so on, and which one to start off in fixer and which to start in developer - these become the subject of many trials and reappraisals.  Color on the other hand had evolved away from the fugacious tones of Cordier's great colorist period, the 70s and 80s.  The fleeting hues of dye coupling agents were no longer on the market, while the article by Dominic Man-Kit Lam and Bryant Rossiter in Scientific American (265, 80-85, 1991) taught us about the Mie effect on color refraction in crystals and showed the way to potassium hydroxide and sodium thiocyanate as enhanced or supercharged developers and fixers, giving us a new source of color.  No one told us we'd need a magician's wizardry to make them work, but they were still a possibility.  So for several years that's what I was doing - my version of Cordier's teaching, with a few tweaks added.

Collins, etched chemigram 71914-7, 2014

I suppose I peaked in this approach around 2011.  An example I still point to with stubborn pride is the untitled picture at the the top of the blogpost on lightfastness in chemigam colors from August of that year.  It has gone by various titles and been exhibited widely - I love saying that even if nothing I do is 'exhibited widely' - most notably at the Center for Photographic Art in California.  Click back and look at it.  You have the linearity that comes so effortlessly to chemigrams, the black lines, the white lines, the colored areas so easily controlled, the pastel-y choices leaning toward the cool; the clean finish, the modest amount of jumble to give it a rhythm.  Maybe not your cup of tea but not bad you must admit as planned execution.

And yet even then I was beginning to feel trapped by the very tools and approaches of the classic chemigram.  I wanted to break out from them, from the patterns, the motifs, the graphic tricks that come so readily to it, but I didn't know how.  Something was missing for me in chemigrams and I wasn't quite sure what that was - an authenticity maybe, a soul, or the mark of the hand as Rich would say.  In despair I began abusing the photographic paper, punching holes in it, burning it; I tried bleaches and acids.  Then in 2012 I went to Pittsburgh and learned the basics of mordançage.  It wasn't until I found that the old books called it bleach-etch, a name I liked better - more gutsy and literal - that I cautiously began trying it on chemigrams, stripping off the emulsion and basically trampling and desecrating it, then rebuilding it as an alternative face.  It's a daunting, unforgiving method, but in these pictures I'm showing you today - pictures both pristine and devastated - I began to see some of the pain and beauty I had sought.  Chris Anderson came by the studio, saw them too, and dubbed them simply 'etched chemigrams'.  Then she did some herself.

Collins, etched chemigram 10715-3, 2015

Collins, etched chemigram 91714-3, 2014

Collins, etched chemigram 93014-1, 2014

The chemigram is not gone but on the contrary stands at the center of this enterprise, if only as the house into which we go to destroy it.  Without it as point of departure, or better yet without the belief the chemigram is founded upon, namely that paper and gelatin and silver salts must be reckoned with at the most intimate level if we are ever going to make a true picture, we wouldn't have a chance.

There exist other pathways from the rigors of the chemigram, this is just one.  You will find the others on your own.

Douglas Collins