Alternative Processes & Photographic Techniques
Transcript of Alternative Processes & Photographic Techniques
Alternative Processes & Photographic Techniques
Throughout photography’s history, technological improvements have caused many photographic
processes to fall out of widespread use. This print viewing features artworks made by
contemporary artists who utilize 19th Century processes. Also included are artists who have
invented their own processes or use hybrid processes in order to achieve particular visual or
conceptual effects.
Artist: Aspen Mays
Title: 1%
Date: 2008
Medium: C-Print; Photograph
Dimensions: Frame: 24 ½ x 28 ½ in
Paper: 20 in x 24 in
Credit Line: Museum Purchase
Danh, Binh
Vietnamese-American, b. 1977
Bin Danh's inventive photographic work centers on the lingering evidence of the war in Vietnam
and surrounding areas in Southeast Asia, evoking how remnants of the war are found in the
shape of memory, tangible traces in the landscape, and historical records. Using the relationship
of form and content in his work to quietly raise challenging questions, Danh offers a meditation
on how these different manifestations of a violent past can overlap and affect each other.
Danh begins with found photographs from Vietnam and the Cambodian "killing fields," which he
gathers from archives, military records, and newspapers. He then prints these images directly
onto tropical leaves, using a photographic procedure that employs the plants' natural processes.
To create these "chlorophyll prints", as he calls them, Danh presses living leaves between glass
plates along with a photographic negative (generated digitally from the source photograph), and
exposes them to sunlight over the course of weeks or months. The areas that are blocked by the
negative are prevented from producing chlorophyll in the process of photosynthesis, leading to
different colorations in the light sensitive pigments in the leaves and causing the image to come
into view. In pieces such as Drifting Souls #4 (2005), the faded appearance of the image and
the fragility of the dried leaf give the impression of a scene wavering between presence and
absence. The photograph here appears as a ghostly after-image in the leaf, embodying Danh's
perception that "the memory of war lives on in the landscape."
Title: Drifting Souls #4
Date: 2005
Medium: Chlorophyll Print; Resin
Dimensions: Frame: 8 in x 14 in
Credit Line: Museum Purchase
Title: Memory of Tuol Sleng Prison, Child 7
Date: 2010
Medium: Chlorophyll Print; Resin
Dimensions: Frame: 8 in x 10 ½ in
Credit Line: Gift of the Artist
Mann, Curtis
American, b. 1979
For his series, “Modifications,” Curtis Mann appropriates and refashions vernacular photographs
of Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, and Kenya—places where a conflict seems deeply rooted and
even impossible to resolve. Mann states, "I question what I've learned about these places and I
realize I usually have to erase most of that knowledge and begin again—more open-minded,
more curious, and more hopeful than before." Submitting the found images to intensive physical
alterations Mann filters them through a new visual vocabulary. Because his photographs resist a
sense of stable meaning, they invite individual interpretation and a more abstract, even
imaginative consideration of what it means to live in a place overcome by war.
After collecting photographs from photo-sharing websites, estate sales, and online auctions,
Mann enlarges them and paints certain parts of the photographs with a clear varnish. When he
submerges these prints in household bleach the varnished areas resist the bleach while the
untreated portions of the image are washed away. As a result, large sections of each photograph
are replaced by a bright white void or a blank space ready for projection, while at its edges
gradients of red and yellow bear faint traces of the original image. The varnished areas depict
clusters of people or fragments of buildings, fully visible but isolated in these otherworldly
landscapes.
Title: Escape, Attempt (Somewhere, Israel)
Date: 2007
Medium: C-Print, Graphite, Mixed Media
Dimensions: Paper: 18 in x 22 in
Credit Line: Museum Purchase w/ funds from
Herbert & Virginia Lust
Title: Rebuild (Somewhere, Israel)
Date: 2007
Medium: C-Print, Graphite, Mixed Media
Dimensions: Paper: 18 in x 22 in
Credit Line: Museum Purchase w/ funds from
Herbert & Virginia Lust
Mays, Aspen
American, b. 1980
Aspen Mays uses everyday materials to investigate photography’s role as scientific evidence and
documentation. Starting with a sense of curiosity and using research as a catalyst for her work,
Mays poetically translates scientific investigation into photographic works that raise far larger
questions than they attempt to answer. In her color photogram of TV static, entitled 1% (2008),
Mays refers to NASA’s claim that one percent of television static is caused by cosmic radiation
left over from the Big Bang. Seeing remnants of the explosion that created our universe
broadcast over a device that has dominated modern media culture demonstrates the curious
ways our ongoing cosmic story is transmitted and made visible through technology. Later, when
the artist was conducting research on a Fulbright Fellowship at the European Southern
Observatory in Chile in 2010 and 2011, she created another body of work concerned with the
cosmos, Punched Out Stars. While exploring the facility’s grounds, she discovered an abandoned
photography darkroom with old pictures of stars tucked in hidden corners throughout the room.
Using a hole punch, she removed the stars, leaving behind unmarked areas that might represent
gaps in our ability to map outer space and revealing that much of the information connecting us
to distant cosmic occurrences remains unintelligible.
Title: 1%
Date: 2008
Medium: C-Print; Photograph
Dimensions: Frame: 24 ½ x 28 ½ in
Paper: 20 in x 24 in
Credit Line: Museum Purchase
Title: Punched Out Stars #10
Date: 2011
Medium: Gelatin Silver Print
Dimensions: Frame: 7 ¼ in x 9 in
Credit Line: Gift of the Artist & Golden Gallery
Sparagana, John
American, b. 1958
John Sparagana’s “Sleeping Beauty” series is comprised of mass-produced fashion magazine
pages that have been crumpled by hand until the images become soft and hazy and the paper
feels like cloth. Rich in reversals and seeming contradictions, the process of their creation is one
of destruction. Yet while the extreme fatigue obviously demonstrates break down, the traces of
image and withstanding unity of the paper nonetheless evoke persistence, speaking as much to
the deeply entrenched impact of advertising as to the physical material of the media that convey
its messages. Sparagana highlights such contrasts by preserving a pristine strip from the
distress endured by the rest of the page. This triptych of untitled double-page spreads shifts the
strip of clarity from one figure to another with a cinematic sweep. Seen together the group
provides a telling glimpse of information lost from the original image and what is gained in
Sparagana’s alternating decisions to neglect or transform.
Title: Untitled, 2005
Date: 2005
Medium: Mixed Media
Dimensions: 6 ¼ in x 9 ¼ in & 8 in x 9 ¼ in
Credit Line: Museum Purchase
Hamilton, Ann
American, b. 1956
Ann Hamilton created a mouth-held pinhole camera, holding a canister containing a strip of film
in her mouth and using her lips as an aperture to create a series of self-portraits in 1998. By
2001, however, she shifted her interest from strictly the self to sometimes include others in the
series “Face to Face.” Face to Face #60 depicts her hands and a desktop framed by the striated
edges of her lips. The shape of the opening suggests an eye, alluding to the visual nature of a
photograph, while the act of opening her mouth recalls speaking–a reminder that Hamilton is
both revealing an intimate view and authoring it.
Title: Face to Face #60
Date: 2001
Medium: Gelatin Silver Print; Camera Obscura
Dimensions: Frame: 18 in x 22 in x 1 ¼ in
Image: 3 ½ in x 10 in
Credit Line: Museum Purchase
Greene, Myra
American, b. 1975
Myra Greene writes: "throughout my artistic practice, I have returned to the body to explore
issues of difference, beauty, physical and emotional recollections as they play out on the surface
of the skin." In her series, “Character Recognition,” Greene adopts the wet-plate collodion
process, a 19th-century photographic method that was implicated in the history of colonialism
and slavery and used as tool for ethnographic classification. Ethnographic photography was at
times aimed at creating a typological record of racial physiognomy; Greene amplifies and
examines these preoccupations by photographing her own nose, lips, ears, and skin—which she
describes as "the features of race"—as if dismembered from the rest of her body.
Although Greene is working with a highly-coded historical process, one that evokes a
complicated and disconcerting past, her photographic studies reorient it in a number ways. She
uses a black glass plate, instead of the conventional transparent glass, which results in a unique
positive image instead of a negative that could be used to make endless reproductions.
Moreover, in making self-portraits, she willingly stands before the camera and controls the
process. Her photographs capture not only parts of the body but their small expressive gestures.
Effectively allowing the body to "speak back" in this manner, Greene reacts to and rejects the
previous modes and manners of classification, displacing the collodion photograph's role in
these practices as an exploitative, quasi-scientific record; in its place she offers a rich sensory
experience that hints at the individual and the personal.
Title: Untitled (Dark Bearing Teeth)
Date: 2008
Medium: Ambrotype
Dimensions: 3 in x 4 in
Credit Line: Museum Purchase
Title: Untitled (Intense Eye w/ Part Nose)
Date: 2008
Medium: Ambrotype
Dimensions: 3 in x 4 in
Credit Line: Gift of the Artist
Title: Untitled (Frontal Nose Intense Eye)
Date: 2008
Medium: Ambrotype
Dimensions: 3 in x 4 in
Credit Line: Museum Purchase
Title: Untitled (Profile Mostly Dark Nose)
Date: 2008
Medium: Ambrotype
Dimensions: 3 in x 4 in
Credit Line: Gift of the Artist
Title: Untitled (Right Ear Shredded Side)
Date: 2008
Medium: Ambrotype
Dimensions: 3 in x 4 in
Credit Line: Museum Purchase
Simpson, Lorna
American, b. 1960
Always interested in exploring identity through the instant assumptions provided by her use of
visual clues, Lorna Simpson took James Van der Zee's photographs as her starting point for 9
Props. Van der Zee was an African-American photographer who made studio portraits of an
emerging Black middle class in Harlem in the early twentieth century, complete with painted
backdrops and domestic furnishings that suggest the prosperity of his subjects. Made while she
was an artist-in-residence at Pilchuck, a glassblowing school in Seattle, Simpson had the
artisans recreate the vases that appear in Van der Zee's pictures. She then photographed the
objects and later accompanied them with texts. Simpson printed the photographs and texts onto
felt, a strategy she began using in the mid-1990s, partly as a reaction against her work being
pigeonholed in the literalist category of "political art." By endowing the pictures with tactility and
three-dimensionality, Simpson aligns her work with the modernist concern with surface and
forms. Keeping the theme uncertain with hazy images and ambiguous text, Simpson's felt panels
are lush objects that use photography to distill and delete, rather than document, touching upon
issues of class, wealth, and strength of character.
Title: 9 Props
Date: 1995
Medium: Lithograph; Mixed Media
Dimensions: Box (Closed): 11 ¼ in x 15 ½ in
Image: 6 ½ in x 8 ¼ in
Credit Line: Museum Purchase
Irazu, Pello
Spanish, b. 1963
Photography translates three dimensions into two, representing a world with depth and volume
as a flat image that provides the illusion of space. Meanwhile the photographic image usually
establishes a sense of a visual order, suggesting stable relationships between the various
elements it depicts as they are momentarily aligned from a certain viewpoint. Known primarily
for his drawings, paintings and sculptures, Pello Irazu recently began incorporating photography
into his work. In these explorations, which ambiguously fuse the different media, Irazu highlights
the tension between the two-dimensional surface of the image and its representation of space,
prodding us to consider exactly what we are seeing.
Irazu's sculptures are the starting point for the “La Fábrica (Belgrado)” series, if not precisely
their subject. After constructing a sculpture in his studio—in this case a stack of boxes on a
simple chair—he photographs it with tight framing and using a shallow depth of field. Irazu then
prints the photograph and applies layers of acrylic paint to the surface. The painted portions
both integrate with and destabilize the logical order of the image. Depending on where your eyes
rest within the picture, the paint either appears as a superficial addition, accentuating the
photograph's flatness, or it seems to blend into the sculpture in the photograph in a trompe l'oeil
fashion.
Title: La Fabrica (Belgrado) XI
Date: 2007
Medium: Inkjet Print; Acrylic Pain
Dimensions: Frame: 15 ½ in x 18 ½ in
Image: 9 in x 12 in
Credit Line: Museum Purchase
Title: La Fabrica (Belgrado) VI
Date: 2007
Medium: Inkjet Print; Acrylic Pain
Dimensions: Frame: 15 ½ in x 18 ½ in
Image: 9 in x 12 in
Credit Line: Museum Purchase
Opera, John
American, b. 1975
John Opera’s unique anthotypes are made using antiquarian photographic processes involving
photosensitive material derived from various berries and vegetables. Painting with inks on water
in a glass-bottomed tray over an exposure unit, Opera creates a marbleized composition. He
then exposes the image to light and onto a contact print, creating a negative. The negative is
then placed over paper treated with natural dyes (beets, blueberries, and pokeberries) that fade
away when left to age in sunlight for weeks at a time. John Opera’s unique anthotypes are made
using antiquarian photographic processes involving photosensitive material derived from various
berries and vegetables. Painting with inks on water in a glass-bottomed tray over an exposure
unit, Opera creates a marbleized composition. He then exposes the image to light and onto a
contact print, creating a negative. The negative is then placed over paper treated with natural
dyes (beets, blueberries, and pokeberries) that fade away when left to age in sunlight for weeks
at a time. Opera’s intention in using the anthotype process is first to emphasize the dialectic
between photography’s surface qualities and its qualities as illusionistic and indexical space.
Secondly, the works make reference to the inherent relationship between liquid chamical
reactions inside the natural world and their connected activity that brings a traditional
photographic image into being.
Title: C-2
Date: 2010
Medium: Anthotype
Dimensions: Frame: 16 ½ in x 19 ½ in
Paper: 7 ½ in x 9 ¼ in
Credit Line: Gift of the Artist
Heinecken, Robert
American, 1931-2006
Robert Heinecken, who is perhaps best known for his assemblages of found images from torn
magazine pages and for photographs containing familiar media iconography, continually
redefined the role of photographer and perceptions of photography as an art medium. Trained in
design, drawing, and printmaking, Heinecken's signature work incorporates public images (from
magazines, newspapers, and television) and his own darkroom activity which changes the
interpretation of the original images. Though Heinecken is rarely behind the lens of a camera, his
process is faithfully photographic. Yet he is often discussed less in terms of photography and
more in terms of conceptual art. To put a name to Heinecken's unique combination of interests
and technique, he was dubbed a "photographist" by philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto
who described the responsibility of the modern artist as "creating art that functions in part as a
philosophical reflection of its own nature."
Title: Periodical #7 Los Angeles, Oct. 17, 1974
Date: 1974
Medium: Mixed Media
Dimensions: 8 ¼ in x 10 ¾ in
Credit Line: Museum Purchase
Patterson, Christian
American, b. 1972
Christian Patterson’s Fond du Lac Telephone Directory is an exact 244-page facsimile of the
artist’s own phonebook from his hometown in Wisconsin, printed soon after his birth in 1973.
Marked with extensive autobiographical notes and references, doodles, jokes, and marginalia—
with photographs, found materials, and drawings interspersed throughout—Fond du Lac, which
translates from French to “Bottom of the Lake,” provides a snapshot of a time and place before
technology allowed for instant and constant means of communication. Pairing the factual
document of the phonebook with his own subjective interventions in its pages, Patterson speaks
to the transformations in his perception of his hometown from childhood through adolescence
and on to adulthood.
Title: Fond du Lac Telephone Directory
Date: 2014
Medium: Artist Book
Dimensions: 8 ½ in x 10 ½ in
Credit Line: Museum Purchase
Siegel, Arthur
American, 1913-1978
Arthur Siegel crafted intricate photograms and graphic documentary photographs early in his
career. In the late 1940s and 50s, he introduced creative methods of back-lighting and
projecting light onto surfaces, as well as an innovative use of color in both experimental and
documentary photographs. All of his explorations–-with photograms, applications of Polaroid
film, and combination printing–-were designed to explore the singular characteristics of a
medium based on light.
Title: Jewel
Date: 1948
Medium: Gelatin Silver Print; Photogram
Dimensions: Image: 10 1/8 in x 13 ¼ in
Paper: 10 ¼ in x 13 ½ in
Credit Line: Museum Purchase
Robinson, Michael
American, b. 1981
Known for his experimental films, Michael Robinson disseminates new meanings from
fragments of pop culture. Through mediating seemingly disparate elements from found and
original footage that borrow from personal and collective memory (clips from the popular 1990s
television show, Full House, Michael Jackson music videos, and Sega videogames, for example),
his films exude both visual and narrative complexity. Much like his multilayered films, Robinson’s
photographic collages source imagery as varied as fruit tree diseases or computer graphics from
the 1980s to fabricate unfamiliar forms that are then assembled over found photographs of
idyllic landscapes to create new, otherworldly contexts.
Title: I Don’t Know Anybody Else
Date: 2013
Medium: Inkjet Print; Mixed Media; Collage
Dimensions: Frame: 13 ¼ in x 17 ½ in
Image: 10 in x 14 in
Credit Line: Museum Purchase
Rossiter, Alison
American, b. 1953
For more than thirty years, Alison Rossiter has been making work that focuses on the materials
and processes of analog photography. Considering the inherent characteristics of the medium
and experimenting with a variety of techniques, she has made photograms and light drawings in
the darkroom and engaged with the way photographs make use of light by photographing solar
eclipses. More recently she has collected expired photographic papers from the last six decades
and printed them to reveal latent forms caused by gradual exposure to elements like moisture
and humidity.
For Kodak Azo F4, expired in February 1922, processed in 2011 (#1 Mold), her process is
intentionally simple: in the darkroom she dips the small sheets of paper from 1922 in developer,
submerging it partway. The result resembles an ominous landscape. The apparent smoke, or
clouds, on the horizon are latent in the old paper itself, produced by mold that found its way into
the box of materials. The invasive residues of the outside world are what give Rossiter’s prints
their atmospheric qualities, while giving shape to moody environments that never really existed.
Title: Kodak Azo F4, Expired in Feb. 1922,
Processed in 2011 (#1 Mold)
Date: 2011
Medium: Gelatin Silver Print
Dimensions: Frame: 9 ½ in x 11 ½ in
Image: 3 1/8 in x 5 1/3 in
Credit Line: Museum Purchase
Alternative Processes & Photographic Techniques
• Look carefully at the image. What pulls your attention? Why?
• What can you tell about how this image was made?
• Why do you think the artist chose to use that particular technique?
• What do you think this work is about?
• What do you think the artist was trying to communicate through this work? Why?
Deeper Reading: Adding Context
We can learn a lot about some images just through what we observe in the photograph. In many
cases learning about the artist, their intentions and the cultural and historic context in which the
work was made adds much to our understanding. For example, knowledge of Bin Danh’s working
process and connection to Vietnam is important to understanding his work. Awareness of the
histories surrounding the two wars referenced in Martha Rossler’s work is critical to
understanding those works.
After students carefully look at the work and consider the above questions, ask them to read
about the artist, the techniques they use to produce their work, and learn about the cultural and
historic context in which the work was made. The teacher or docent could also provide some of
this information. After students have learned some context surrounding the work, ask them to
reconsider the images and how this additional information impacts their understanding.