a-n Profesional Development Blog

I run a forum of artists that meets once a month called Field/s, I set it up with funding I was awarded by Artquest in partnership with the Photographers’ Gallery and always invite a guest to join us.

At one of our recent meetings I shared my first analogue and digital print with the forum to get feedback. It was an interesting conversation as the work is still only in a phase of development, further made more confusing as I’ve been using existing materials from previous projects as my source material to develop the work technically. I’ve finally reached a stage where I can now work on the project and know that technically I have it under control. Therefore the conversation was mostly highlighting and discussing the areas of the print that technically were most successful or interesting and the myriad of possibilities that I can exploit with this new process. I look forward to seeing where the project takes me now that I know how to work with the material, bringing together analogue and digital techniques and process for the first time—something no one else has attempted with this paper before and something I wouldn’t have been able to even think about without the support of the a-n professional bursary I was awarded.

The time had come to attempt my first analogue and digital test. I first had to collect the exposed paper from Metro Imaging. They had already exposed the digital image I had made onto the paper, which was then carefully wrapped up in a light-tight tube. I took this to the studio up the road and with the help of Andrew Bruce laid it out on the metal paper holding it down with magnets as before. This was done in complete darkness once we had set up the lights.

Once everything was set up, the lights were off and the paper was laid out I placed a number of objects onto the surface of the paper. This time I further increased the variety of objects to also include 10×8″ negatives, newspaper, string, eggs, feathers, coins, tissue paper, photocopies and other printed-matter. We exposed the paper to the flash light and rolled it up in a tube and took it back to Metro to run it through the processing machine and this is the result!

It was really interesting to see how the physical ‘analogue’ elements intercepted the digital image in different ways. Essentially anywhere that is blocked by an object will leave an unexposed patch, and this is where the digital image will become visible. Below you can see some close ups of sections that I thought worked particularly well.

After working with the paper now for a while and testing its exposure to an analogue way of working, I wanted to start combing this with a digital image to further develop my original idea. To proceed I’d need a digital image to work with.

To do this I decided that I wanted to play with how both analogue and digital technologies render the surface of things differently so I employed a few different ways of image-making to make my digital image. First I borrowed a hand-scanner to try scanning wooden surfaces, part of the original Bauhaus exercise. This was quite fun because I’d never used one before. The hand scanner is quite challenging to work with, it has to remain in contact with the object you are scanning and if something is too complex it simply cuts-out. I scanned various items to see what would happen and a few of them you can see below.

I combined many of these handspans on to one single digital canvas that would projected onto the digital silver gelatin paper. I also “drew” woodgrain onto the finished canvas in black and white to have some defined areas of both black and white. The hand-scans are all rendered with the objects reproduced 1:1 in scale, this to keep everything (both analogue and digital) at the same life-sized scale. I applied a gradient to the whole image to help work out combined digital and analogue exposure values. The finished digital image for my first analogue and digital test is below:

Seeing as the last few tests were successful I decided that the next one would not be a test strip, but I would instead try one exposure for the whole sheet of paper to create one image. Everything went well, I went through my notes and tried to calculate what the exposure should be to create black. This time I wanted to test further types of materials that I would like to work with in the future, so used materials that I have made for some of my other projects. This included magpie feathers, photocopies, newspaper cut outs, tissue paper as well as the eggs and string that come from the original Bauhaus exercise.

After exposing the paper, wrapping it up in a light-tight tube and taking it to Metro and putting it through the processing machine, it came out grey… not black…

It turns out that I had made a mistake when I was calculating the exposure. Next time instead of trying to combine the exposure I will instead stick to the number of separate flashes that add up to make black.

This is the result of a test bouncing the flash light off a reflector in an attempt to create softer edge around the objects placed on the photographic paper. It worked! Something that I now know is how the paper will work when exposed to both harsh and soft lights and has given me some ideas into how I could combine the two at a later date.