From: Keith Gerling (keith@gumphoto.com)
Date: 09/29/03-06:29:22 AM Z
Very, very nice.
Congratulations!
Keith
-----Original Message-----
From: Katharine Thayer [mailto:kthayer@pacifier.com]
Sent: Sunday, September 28, 2003 10:01 PM
To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
Subject: In Defense of Gum Bichromate
I've been working on a website off and on for awhile but had given up on
it a couple of weeks ago because it's so impossible to adjust the images
so they look well on different systems. I suddenly decided today to go
ahead and upload it, such as it is, but it will be undergoing major
changes soon, since in the last few days I've realized what this website
is going to be as a permanent site, which I am actually quite excited
about.
Let me be clear from the outset that this website is not about my work
as art. If it were that, it would be very quiet and calm and nicely
designed and professional-looking, and it would be a separate domain,
not a home page at my ISP address, and it would show only series,
complete series, instead of isolated images. It would show four series:
(1) the starling series, a series of large gum prints of a huge flock of
starlings looking like a giant organism dancing in the sky, done in
2000. There are no examples of that series on this site. (2) the Surf
series, done in 2002, represented by one image on this site. (3) the
Fishing Boat Named Desire series, done in 2001-2002, which is
represented by one image on this site, and (4) the Limpet series, done
in 1999, which is represented on this site but by a really bad gallery
photograph. There would be 30 images on a site that was about *The Work
of Katharine Thayer*. I forgot how many images I've thrown onto this
site, but probably close to that many, but only three of them would also
be on the other one. These are just a few of the hundreds of gum prints
that I have made.
This site, as it stands at the moment, is about refuting
mischaracterizations about gum that I'm tired of hearing. I started it
after APIS when some folks were telling us what gum prints look like and
what the standard gum formula will and won't do. In a parody of the
famous line ("I KNEW Jack Kennedy and you're no Jack Kennedy") I kept
thinking, "I KNOW gum bichromate, and you guys don't know what the heck
you're talking about." So I started the website then, and that's why
it's titled "In Defense of Gum Bichromate." I just gathered whatever I
could find, a motley assortment of some old scans of older exhibition
prints, some test prints, some scrap prints, whatever I could find lying
around, that demonstrate some of the many ways that the standard gum
formula will print. This isn't about imagery, it's about the printing
process, and to get hung up on the rather conventional imagery of some
of the older work would be to miss the point. This is about printing and
process.
Later I thought of putting a little tutorial on there about opacity vs
density, since people were having such a hard time grasping the concept
that they are two different issues in gum printing. But I couldn't find
a tube of gouache so gave up that plan. But I hope from some of the
prints themselves you might be able to get some idea of what I'm talking
about when I talk about luminosity and transparency, which might be
enlightening to folks who haven't ever seen transparent gum prints.
I'm sorry to say that with two or three exceptions, these images won't
look good on a Mac, or on any machine that's set to 1.8 gamma. If you
have a Mac and you want to see them the way they should look, the advice
I would give you is go to your monitor control panel and change the
gamma to "uncorrected" just while you look at this site.
Okay, here it is:
http://www.pacifier.com/~kthayer
It's a very simple, okay, primitive site, straight html, so there
shouldn't be any problem with anyone accessing it.
Anyone with comments or questions about the site or the information on
it should write me privately.
Katharine Thayer
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