Discovering new (old) papers: Luminos

fig. 1 Charcoal R

To a darkroom maven, there's nothing like discovering a paper you've never used before and which, as sort of a gift from the photographic gods, displays qualities both unexpected and lovely.  One such for us recently has been Luminos, particularly the Charcoal R and the Tapestry X.  It began when my friend Lou Spitalnick let us have some of his old stock from the house he keeps at the end of Long Island.  "Go ahead, take what you want," he said.  Was his smile a knowing one?


We did.  Rich Turnbull was first to have at it and created the Charcoal R images in figures 1 and 2.  It turns out it's a warm-tone, fiber-base paper, probably a chlorobromide emulsion, but that's not what stands out.  First, it's the texture.  Charcoal R has a rough texture, rather similar to certain varieties of printmaking paper.  You pass your fingers over it and they tingle: the surface speaks.  But the paper's architecture has another secret, and that is that the emulsion seems to be buried deep within it, not at the surface.  Did the Luminos people plan on an unsized, highly absorbent paper, like a waterleaf paper?  That seems to be the case, because the images you get from it have a hazy, muted cast, as if they were peeking out shyly from a forest of paper fibers.  In the case of colors, this produces a whole range of tones and qualities new to our experience.

fig. 2 Charcoal R

fig. 3 Tapestry X

Tapestry X has the same formulation, with the difference that the paper has been given a more pronounced, canvas-like feel, an artsy effect popular in the years after WWII - witness now forgotten names like Wellington Art Canvas, Velour Black, Athena Old Master, etc.  Note the grain of the texture.  The problem with using this paper for chemigrams however is this, that it's so unsized your varnish resist just sinks in and apparently cannot form a tight varnish-emulsion bond, essential for the elaboration of incisions and mackie lines.  Its beauty is its curse.  One solution is to apply multiple coats of varnish, letting each dry in turn, so that you build up a scaffold of varnish material to work with.  Without this the varnish won't adhere to the emulsion; you'll get scumbling and lifeless incisions, as seen in figure 4.  (Some may actually favor this, of course!)

fig. 4 Tapestry X

Luminos production began in 1947 and was discontinued in 2005, probably under the onslaught of the 'digital revolution' although their press releases at the time spoke of paper supply issues.  Luckily, the papers are still available online.  Or, if you have more time than we have, you can make your own, mixing potassium and silver salts with gelatin and a paper of your choice, with details on the internet.

Chemigram summit in New York

It was Sunday night June 2, and we were five flights above West 40th Street, more than a dozen of us gathered from three continents, practitioners of the subtle art of the chemigram.  The elevator had broken and you had to climb up a sinister, badly lit stairwell, but no matter: Pierre Cordier was here on a rare visit to New York, holding forth, making pronouncements, examining work brought before him like so many offerings.  Others will summarize and analyze the evening, there is time for that, and substance aplenty to animate future discussions.  At the outset, the simple fact of his presence (as though mythic) was enough to dazzle and beguile us, while as the evening wore on his spirited banter put us more at ease and each of us were allowed privately to wonder at how fortunate we were, all of us, to be together.  It was indeed an historic moment, sixty-one years after Cordier's invention.

Pictured above L to R are Matt Higgins, Eva Nikolova, Paul Kleinman, Gundi Falk, Douglas Collins, Pierre Cordier, Jett Ulaner Sarachek, Nolan Preece, Franco Marinai, Norm Sarachek, and Richard Turnbull.

What is Matt Higgins doing?

Higgins, untitled, 2012

Matt Higgins is an Australian who eats, sleeps, and dreams chemigrams.  At the Australian National University he's deep into writing a thesis called Chemical Potential: A Darkroom Upside Down.  You'll want to urge your local bookseller to stock it.  He speaks of the joy and madness of doing everything wrong, of committing crimes against paper, abusing it, mocking it, and in the process making images that push hard against the boundaries of what can ultimately be done with photography.  He should probably be locked up he's so bad.  Until then let us enjoy the pictures he's able to give us.

What you see above is done using one of his favorite tools, acrylic gloss from a spray can.  He covers his paper, then plunges it into chemistry according to a certain timing - timing is everything in chemigrams - and goes on from there, making a terrific mess before it quietly acquiesces and turns beautiful.  Another favorite is a gunk called apple stroop, sort of an apple syrup, which if used right can yield works like this one:

Higgins, untitled, 2012

which is made something like this:

where you can see the pot of syrup at the bottom, and the recent lines of attack at the four sides.  Higgins seems to be evolving rapidly : it was barely a year ago that he was making the classic chiseled-square or checkerboard pictures that appeared in Christina Anderson's book, but those days are far behind.  One technique that thankfully hasn't been dropped from his arsenal is the loose acrylic approach, with which he effortlessly produces pictures like this:

How can you not like it?

Higgins, untitled, 2012

He lives in Canberra, where since the age of 10 he has had a relationship, possibly illicit, with another Canberra resident, Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles at the Australian National Gallery.  These are frothy waters to be swimming in.  Matt Higgins is handling it, and not ready to come ashore.

Pollock, Blue Poles, 1952

Cordier in San Francisco

Cordier, 21/4/72 I  after a computer drawing of Manfred Mohr, 1972

The Haines Gallery of San Francisco has mounted a geometry-flavored show entitled "Poetics of Construction" featuring Pierre Cordier, Ai Weiwei, Andy Goldsworthy, and the amazing Monir Farmanfarmaian, among others.  The objects in this show - and most are indeed objects, with a sculptural physicality evident or implicit - have a brooding presence and seem to rest comfortably, even authoritatively, in their appointed space.  Cordier's chemigrams from 1972 fit in nicely with this concept.  Back then, he had just begun to collaborate with Manfred Mohr, the computer art pioneer, who was fresh from exhibiting his first computer-plotted drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.  For Cordier, this was to mark the beginning of a 20-year preoccupation with grids, graphs, and glyphs in some of their more austere forms, mollified perhaps by the chemigramic filter; only since the millenium has the hold of this spell on him begun to ease.  The works shown at the Haines reflect the early stages of that collaboration.

Cordier, 22/4/72 I  after a computer drawing of Manfred Mohr, 1972

The titles refer to the dates of execution and are written in Romance-language style with day, month, year in that order.  So that these two pictures were done on Friday and Saturday, the 21st and 22nd of April 1972.  Why are these dates interesting?

On that very Friday, while Cordier was bent over his darkroom trays, the Apollo 16 spaceship landed on the moon, in an unexplored region called the Descartes Highlands.  Astronauts climbed out, stumbled around in that strange gravity, collected rock samples, took snapshots of each other, saluted the earth and climbed back in.  Cordier was just finishing the first picture.  The following day - Saturday - one of the largest housing projects in America was intentionally demolished by the government because the tenants refused to live in it any longer: they had said they were treated like rats and it was intolerable.  That was Pruitt Igoe, in St Louis, and the documenting of its demolition, which was unprecedented, became one of the iconic moments in the film Koyaanisqatsi (Life Out Of Joint, in the Hopi language) by Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass.  Cordier meanwhile was just completing the second.  In the brief space of a day, a monstrous tension between life as it is and life as it might have to be, or become.  In my mind this tension drifts over and envelopes Cordier in his studio, he unaware yet somehow understanding.  His marks are faint but made with a firm and serene hand, his voice no more than a whisper, I see his lips barely moving.  He has been given to record the allegory.  I exagerate but then I do not.

Apollo 16, Moon, near the Descartes Crater, 1972

Pruitt Igoe, St Louis, 1972

The Cordier works on display are c-prints from the chemigram original, printed in editions of 12.  The show runs until March 9, 2013.

Images from sound files: new prints from Arnold Brooks

Brooks, untitled, 2012, 30 x 30"

That the senses are interconnected is not a fresh insight.  Kandinsky was dreaming of it back in 1913, at the birth of abstraction, and Rimbaud, with his derangement of the senses, had thought of it before him: once pure sound was divorced from scales, instruments, hymnals, it could become a tool of the modern artist, like the colors of the palette.  You could hear a piece by Stravinsky and then go to your studio and paint it, if your senses allowed for that.  Yet the problem in pictures was this, that for a thousand years we had thought not about time, the matrix that sound lives in, but about space.  Yes there were correspondences: we could depict sound as color if we were so inclined, we could even convince the public of that, but to find a depiction of sound as time was another matter altogether.  Space, capacious and accommodating, was for putting things into, like kings and queens, sun-washed cities, dwarfs, groupings of fruit on a table, naked bathers.  It had a physical reality you could touch.  You could put things there and they stayed there; you could return to look at them later.  Not so with time: you put something there and it was as good as lost, because time flowed, it was never the same again.  That B-flat chord on the piano - gone.  That Verdi aria - gone.

Kandinsky, A Few Circles, 1926

Toward the end of the last century, because of technology, this began to change.  Devices had been invented which preserved time as physical marks or tracks, as successions of instants, that could be played back - first the phonograph, then cinema, then tape recorders.  Later, the development of the computer and concomitant inventions in mathematics and signal processing ushered in definitive changes for the storing of sound, namely its digitization as strings of 0s and 1s.  You could write code on a piece of paper, feed it to a machine, and a string quartet would play.  What's more, with just a few different assumptions, you could make that same string of code produce a picture.

This is where Arnold Brooks, printmaker, sound artist, filmmaker, enters the scene.  When Arnold, quite by accident, first opened up a sound file in photoshop, the computer imaging editor, he was dumbstruck: here was an image that resembled a seascape or a desert, or the lovely meandering grain that you see in wood - but it was a representation of sound.  What relation was there?  Were certain shapes selected by the computer code?  What forces were at work to render these forms?  He pursued his investigations, terming the images of sound files 'transpositions'.  He found he could reverse the process; he could edit the sound to make other transpositions, or edit the transposition to make other sounds.  His original feelings of deep wonder never ceased.  As he says, "The static image and the time-based piece are literally the same file; in their native environment the files are one.  The transposed file can be manifested simultaneously in two different states while in the computer and is still the exact same file."  And what should we call this manifestation?  Well, if we listen to it it's sound and if we look at it it's a picture - nothing's changed there.  But incredibly, the two are made distinct by a process external to the event: a few mere symbols, more or less, in the computer code, or by running the same code through different codecs or software or ASCII editors.

Arnold is not happy with his transpositions.  He finds them "moribund" because their soul - sound - has been torn out of them.  They are lifeless, he says, they don't ring.  It was with great reluctance then that he showed several at Manhattan Graphics recently as sort of a research in progress, including the image above.  He wasn't ready for the overwhelming enthusiastic reaction he got from fellow artists, which must have surprised and caught him off guard: his transpositions were being compared to some of the outstanding works in the minimalist canon.  Still, if you ask him what really matters he'll say that's pretty hard, because that's asking how shapes are made. 


Arnold Brooks' email is isthmus.pictures.sounds@gmail.com

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

Where you can look at chemigrams this winter

Turnbull, numerical structure 2, 2012

The Hosmer Gallery is located at the Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts, about a 2-hour drive west from Boston.  Very soon you'll be able to see some of Richard Turnbull's work from 2010-2012 there, in a much anticipated show running February 1 to February 28, 2013.  Am I giving it all away by saying that my favorite is the surprising, apocalyptic 'glyph studies 1'?

Turnbull, glyph studies 1, 2012

Meanwhile, down in Pennsylvania Norm Sarachek is having a show at Santa Bannon Fine Art in Bethlehem from December 7 to December 30, 2012, featuring his new 'Steel Works' series.

Sarachek, Steel Works 1, 2012

Sarachek, Steel Works 2, 2012

He follows that up with another show at the Perkins Center for the Arts in southern New Jersey which runs from February 9 to March 23, 2013, because you'll need to see more of this fine artist.

The inventor of the so-called chromoskedasic variation in chemigrams, Dominic Man-Kit Lam, recently concluded a huge show with over 100 works at the Shanghai Art Museum (China) this past October 2012 entitled 'Vision of Harmony'.  He also spoke at the event, and an inspirational video of it has been posted on YouTube.

Man-Kit Lam, from Vision of Harmony, 2012

Man-Kit Lam, from Vision of Harmony, 2012

Man-Kit Lam, installation view, Vision of Harmony, 2012

Back in New York, Eva Nikolova is exhibiting chemigrams from her new series 'Ordinary Disappearances', which offer imaginary but quite emotional Balkan landscapes from and about memory, triggered by a trip to her homeland after many years' absence.  The show is at the Grady Alexis Gallery in El Taller Latinoamericano in upper Manhattan and runs from November 26, 2012 to January 9, 2013.

Nikolova, untitled IV, 2012

Nikolova, untitled VI, 2012

A blog regular, Nolan Preece, is presenting both chemigrams and glassprints at the PUB Gallery, Wildflower Village, Reno, Nevada from November 29, 2012 to January 15, 2013.

Chemigramist Douglas Collins exhibited in the recent Alternative Processes Competition at Soho Photo in lower Manhattan from November 7 to December 1, 2012.  He will also be in the annual group show at the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, California, from January 12 to March 1, 2013.