My Archives: February 2004

Sunday, February 1, 2004

Survived the first day of my alt-process class yesterday. The photo department at the art school is in the basement of the main building, with a veritable maze of twisty-turny hallways, half a dozen different darkrooms, and a couple of classrooms and computer labs thrown in. The syllabus looks like a pretty tame semester may be ahead of me. The first sessions are working with cameraless negatives using variations of the cliche verre process. Basically, we're drawing on acetate sheets with india ink, blotting and scratching the result and making an image with our own little hands. Quite a change from my usual formula, so it should be interesting to see what the prints look like next week. There were some pretty cool tonal gradations as the ink puddles dried down, rings of gray surrounding areas of denser coverage.

Next up for projects is cyanotype and pinhole cameras. Old hat, in some repsects, but also a chance to get better at making enlarged negatives. Also an excellent excuse to buy some sheets of 16x20 lith film for making a few BIG prints.

The rest of the time in the semester will be devoted to working on a "final project", a series of images in any process we'd like to work in. I'm leaning towards doing soome of the light paint images in a cyanotype and gum bichromate combination but who knows what will emerge.

Posted by coldmarble @ 05:16 PM ET [Link] [blab]

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