[alt-photo] Re: Paper Negatives

[Christina Anderson]

Paul,
Sorry it has taken so long to get back on your wonderful prints..this semester of preparing all new lectures for a new class has me busted. Maybe within a year I will not have to prepare new classes again (ha).

That tree and the dancers are sure beautiful.  I think I am a sucker for lone trees. I do like the soft look of these images so the technique is doing you well. But it seems also added unto by the soft colors you are using.

I have done paper negs in the darkroom and what I found was that they were actually too sharp if using RC paper unless one went back and forth several iterations or used fiber paper.  I have exposed some gum prints through the back of paper (watercolor paper) and those are really nice and soft, come to think of it, but never actually went the route of paper negs except long ago with typing paper negs and those looked just like a normal print.  I remember at the time one faculty person was saying digital negatives don't work (this, mind you, was before Pictorico) and I had printed out a plain old typing paper neg and did a gum with it, and she sputtered.  That was even before the Epson 2200 printer, my first foray into really nice negatives with a really nice printer on OHP. Now I am onto my third Epson printer...But I think gum is really wonderful with just about anything, and especially so, IMHO, when the resulting print looks like a cross between a painting and a photograph.

Regarding technique of one gum practitioner vs. another (e.g. Peter's, or mine, doing workshops back to back at Photo Formulary) I think it'd be a hoot if someone had all the money in the world to do the two workshops back to back not because of anything having to do with what I teach or what Peter teaches, but that the real secret to becoming a good gummist is NOT in the teacher, but in DOING it.  I have people who want to take workshops from me as if I have some secret magical thing that I do.  My secret was committing to the gum process in 2003 as my process of choice and doing a thousand gum prints.  Pure and simple.  Work.  So doing two gum workshops back to back would enable a student to spend two full uninterrupted weeks with the process and I bet they would produce much better work. 

Look how far you have come in doing gum over the last year of posting to the alt list.

Gum for me is a kind of...addiction...

I remember an APIS a while back, mentioning no names, and a person talking about another process aside from gum who did not want to share a secret process just yet. My thought was, well why the hell get up and give a talk if you aren't going to share all?  

But I digress...

Thanks for sharing your work,
Chris

Christina Z. Anderson
christinaZanderson.com

On Feb 9, 2010, at 5:01 PM, Paul Viapiano wrote:

> Chris...
> 
> I liked what I saw in Peter's work using the paper negs, so I started experimenting and liked the results enough to continue trying tricolor gum with them. Three pieces of paper are a lot less expensive than OHP, especially when trying out new ideas.
> That being said, I find OHP sharper, easier to register and more defined than paper negs, but not to the degree you'd expect. I found that the paper being used for the print itself played a bigger role. Paper negs printed on Fab EW were very detailed, while negs printed on Rives BFK were dreamy/grainy/ethereal-like.
> For me, they are just another tool in the kit.
> Here are two tricolor images with paper negs on Rives:
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/viapiano/4155163449/
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/viapiano/4138755731/
> Here's a tricolor image with paper negs on Fab EW:
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/viapiano/4066872861/
> And a single color on Rives:
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/viapiano/4235624537/