« Swing bridge over the Waiau River | Main | Ironhigh »

Ancient history

The topic of my musical taste as a teenager has come up several times in light of the Fire Woman revelation. Several of my friends were shocked to hear that I identified as a bit of a goth in my youth.

Here's some college-era evidence of that aesthetic. Self-portrait, 4"x5" gum print on Rives BFK paper, circa 1994. This is the only scan I have, so sorry, you can't zoom in to admire the fine grain of the contact print or the even finer tailoring on the cloak (which I made myself, ahem renaissance fair cough cough).

This is something I miss with digital photography. Gum printing. In college I developed a love for alternative printing processes -- printing photos outside the darkroom. This print is the result of adding a light-sensitive chemical to watercolor paint, brushing the paint on regular (not photo) paper, placing the negative on top, and exposing it under direct sunlight for 20 minutes or so. It's called gum printing because you also add gum arabic to the paint, which hardens as the light-sensitive chemical is exposed to sunlight. You rinse the whole thing in water, and the hardened paint stays on the paper while the rest of it washes off, revealing an organic-looking image of surprising depth affixed to the paper. You add another layer of color and repeat. (This was a black-and-white negative, but I have seen gum prints in four colors using color-separated negatives that stunningly replicate full-color images.)

I love my digital cameras, but getting this intimate and hands-on with my photos taught me lots of things about photography that you just can't learn from pixels. When photography was new, every single image was a labor of love like this one.

I haven't taken a film photo in a few years. But I still have the box of watercolor paints and gum arabic, and the little vial of bright orange powder to make the paint do its magic. I just can't bring myself to throw them away.

August 3, 2006 7:10 PM