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.

Koutroulis, Glassprinter

Koutroulis, Caroline's Garden II, 1968

One of the prominent names in the contemporary section of Symmes and Glassman's Cliché-verre: Hand-Drawn, Light-Printed (1980) is Aris Koutroulis, dean of the Detroit school of glassprint experimenters in the 60s and 70s. I admit my ignorance: I had no idea who he was. But over the years I've been drawn back to the few images of his work I can find, whether glassprints, lithos, or paintings, the glassprints most especially. He had learned the dye transfer process from his early teacher, Caroline Durieux, and began producing glassprints in color, but in a reductive style. I sensed that here was an artist, working within and sensitive to the conceptualist and minimalist paradigms of the art-world at the time, who inevitably, because of who he was, pushed against those limits to strive for a more personal statement. He doesn't seem satisfied with stopping short of that, or ending a picture where another artist might have. Or could it have been the other way around, that he felt he had to dress his expressionistic urges in a cloak of minimalism? We'll leave that for the critics.

The example shown here, Caroline's Garden II (1968), was done using Kodak matrix film and transfer dyes; the entire process is now an historical footnote since Kodak discontinued manufacture of all such materials in 1994. The cluster of veils of film emulsion at the top, the soft ribbons of it descending, the gentle color - that's the picture. Today, Koutroulis might have used the gelatin relief method known by some as mordançage to achieve similar results. Jean-Pierre Sudre, its modern advocate, didn't even give it a name until later.

He received training in lithography (why did so many nonfigurative photographers begin as printmakers?) at Tamarind when Tamarind was just a bare-bone start-up in Los Angeles, with two presses; in time he became one of their first master printers. He printed editions for many leading figures of the 60s. His edition of Josef Albers' Hommage to the Square (1963), printed with Ken Tyler and John Dowell, hangs in museums worldwide. His original work is scattered today and generally unavailable, occasionally showing up at estate auctions in small Michigan communities. A true shame.