From: Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Date: 07/09/03-04:39:21 AM Z
This doesn't relate in any way to Chris's post, but since it's another
musing in relation to historical gum printing, I decided to leave it
under the same subject heading.
I've been gathering what scans and jpegs and slides I can find of some
of my past work, with the idea of putting together a website. I can't
say whether this will actually happen; there's no particular reason for
me to have a website other than for listmembers to see my work, and
chances are that when push comes to shove I'll decide it's not worth the
effort just for that, though I do think that people should be able to
see the work of the folks who are giving expert advice on the list, so
that they can decide for themselves whether the person's advice is worth
anything. So, we'll see whether this happens or not, but at any rate, I
digress.
So I was gathering these things, and I came across jpegs of two of my
gum prints that were made by a succession of processes.. One is a
photograph which I scanned and manipulated digitally, and liked the
results enough that I madee color separations to print the digital image
in gum; the gum print now resides in a private collection in Washington
DC. The other was left over from my transfer phase, a color photograph
that I transferred to watercolor paper using some kind of solvent
transfer. Then later when I started printing in gum, I scanned that
transfer and made color separations to print the image in gum. This gum
print is also in a private collection somewhere. (I wouldn't have shown
either image in its original form, as I don't like digital prints and
besides, the dyes in the dye-sub printer I was using at the time were
extremely fugitive, and I also didn't trust the dyes in the color print
that I transferred in the second example.)
So I was thinking about these gum prints that are gum prints of images
that were generated using different media, and wondering if I should be
embarrassed about that (I decided not). But then I remembered (here's
where we get to the historical part) that Steichen did a lot of this:
rephotographing prints and reproducing them in other processes, although
for him it was the other way; instead of printing images generated
through other processes in gum, as I have done, he rephotographed his
gum prints and reproduced them in other processes. An excerpt from the
Metropolitan Museum of Art's (Naef) book on Stieglitz's collection:
"...it has long been thought that among the Steichen prints collected by
Stieglitz were the most numerous examples of Steichen's original work in
gum-bichromate to survive in one place. It turns out, however, that the
great majority of Stieglitz's collection of Steichen are prints in
bastard processes by which fine facsmiles of the original gum-bichromate
prints, generated from copy negatives of the original gum prints, were
made in gelatine-carbon and gelatine-silver printing materials."
It's assumed that he did this kind of reproduction because it was an
easier way to make several copies of a gum print without having to go to
the work of printing the gum print several times; in other words, it
seems he thought it was easier to print in carbon than in gum!
(Obviously, I don't share this idea).
kt
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