From: Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Date: 06/26/01-04:09:41 AM Z
Hi Ernestine,
You're making me wish I was going to be there.
I appreciate your distinction between process and technique, and agree
with what you said about that.
For me it's not Joe's question of when to decide which printing process
to use, because I print only in gum. I've heard criticism of one-process
printers by people who say that different images require different
processes. I don't want to get into that argument much, except to say
that I disagree. I came to gum at the end of a long search for a way to
express what I see, and for me gum is it, no other process comes
remotely close. What's more, it really does offer enough flexibility to
print many different kinds of images, in fact every kind of image I can
imagine (at this moment in time) that I'd ever want to print.
The creative process for me is totally intuitive, and I photograph
mostly landscapes and nature subjects. How I choose a subject is I'll be
out somewhere and I'll see something that makes me catch my breath, and
I know that's something I have to photograph. Sometimes I'll feel ready
to shoot it that day; sometimes I'll come back and look at it again and
again before I "know" how to do it; there are things I saw years ago
that I still don't know how I'm going to shoot. It's usually not a
particular scene exactly, but more a quality. A certain sheen in water,
or the startling green of backlit leaves in a dark forest, or the way a
flock of birds turns all at once as if it were one organism instead of
many. I don't *think* about how to take the picture, it's more like I
just know when I'm ready to take a particular subject.
Once I've got it on film, then there's often a long process of starts
and stops and problem-solving and trial and error to make the print I
want, because each set of images presents new challenges, so I never
seem to get to do the same thing twice. A series of a flock of birds in
flight was the hardest one so far. The problem was that I saw these
prints BIG, which presented logistical problems. My printing platform
wasn't big enough, my sinks weren't big enough, there was the problem of
making huge negatives from 35mm negs that were blurry to start with --
the challenges were endless. I wanted to show that series at my fall
show last year and I nearly despaired of getting it in time; I was still
printing those birds four days before the opening. But they were,
finally, exactly what I'd wanted them to look like.
And that's one answer to the question: at what point do I have a sense
of the image? As with the birds, I often have that before I ever get the
camera out. For another example, a set of images of various limpet
shells I did several years ago. I remember sitting in a restaurant with
my best fellow and telling him about this installation of limpet shell
images, pointing to the wall and describing them as I could see them in
my mind's eye hanging there, and this was before I'd made a single
picture, before I even knew how I was going to make those pictures. And
when the pictures were hung in a show several months later, it was
exactly as I'd envisioned it.
It's not always the case that I can previsualize the image exactly,
however. Sometimes the camera gets what I wanted to express better than
I was able to see it ahead of time. This is especially true of pinhole
photography, which I've just begun doing in the last year. I'm never
happy with photographs that just show the surface of things, and pinhole
gets me another step away from that.
I'm happy when the final image "works" for me, but of course that isn't
much if it doesn't communicate, so it's gratifying when people say
things like "You know, you made me see grass," or "I never noticed those
birds before I saw your show, but now I see them all the time." If I can
open people's eyes to the beauty around them, that's the ultimate
satisfaction for me.
If your question was about how we decide to expose the film for
alternative processes, I've gone rather far afield.
Katharine Thayer
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