This section (or “gallery”) is devoted to the several hand processes with which I have worked in photographic printing. I have always felt a close connection with the art of printing itself - of all kinds, and not only photographic - and so this has always influenced the way I approach photography itself. This is evident in several of the other galleries of this website. I am perfectly satisfied with many of the images presented here, but less so with certain others. This is due to the technical challenges many of these processes present. So this section is to be considered to some extent as having a didactic purpose, as opposed to simply displaying all the very best, and keeping my lesser efforts and rank failures hidden in boxes and drawers.
There’s a bit of overlap here between the photographic mandalas in palladium, Type C, and Cibachrome. While in that section I show the photographic mandalas, here I emphasize more the other work - the figurative, the portrait, the still-life - whatever is not a mandala. But there are a few of those as well, since that imagery lends itself well to these very printerly processes. (Anyone who has studied painting will have heard the term “painterly” - for paintings which highlight the brushwork and the handling of color, rather than trying to paint so perfectly that one wonders how a human hand could have produced such a painting. For example, the studies of Rubens were so painterly as to remind one of the agitated strokes of Jackson Pollock or the Expressionists, while his full-size, final renditions were much less so.) So I use the term printerly to indicate work that tries to discover the possibilities of a printing process.
In my blog, The Second Stone, there is an article about my experience with some of these alternate processes, which for most photographers belong to the paleolithic age of photography. It’s not a bad introduction to the issues involved in these processes. It’s in Italian, which should make it more interesting. Lo posible es para los tontos!
To those who would like more comprehensive information about these processes, I suggest the works of Luis Nadeau, who knows them better than anyone alive, on both historical and technical levels. His books include “History and Practice of Platinum Printing”, 1984; “History and Practice of Carbon Processes”, 1982; e “Modern Carbon Printing”, 1986; and “Gum-Dichromate and other Direct Carbon Processes from Artigue to Zimmerman”, 1988. I also heartily suggest a very fascinating, beautiful and informative article on the site of the Irving Penn Foundation, and an astounding set of Mr. Penn's studio notes - 75 pages - for his work in pigment and porcelain printing, on the site of the Ryerson and Burnham Art and Architecture Archive.
The so-called alternative processes had their day, and in the 20th century gave way to more modern ways of making photographs - photographic paper manufactured, and ready for use in the darkroom. In the 19th century, the introduction of dry-plate photography was a great boon to photographers, whether they worked in the field or in a studio in a city - one no longer had to prepare a wet-plate in the darkroom, let it dry just the right amount, slap it into one’s view camera and go take the picture, be it landscape, battleground, or portrait. The photographers of the American West could take as many glass plates as their donkeys could carry, much as travelers in the late 20th century would take so many rolls of film along with them, and much as photographers now will be sure to have enough memory cards. A colleague of mine years ago commented that photography has gotten a lot easier over the years, but it hasn’t gotten any better.
Allen Schill, August 2023
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