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One of the first classes I taught out of graduate school was a course called "Photo Process Workshop". In the course students learned a variety of alternative and experimental processes, including cynaotype, van dyke brown, cliche verre, modern tinype, book binding, appropriation, installation, ...the list goes on and on. Anyway, we all know what old photographic processes look like - they look old. I needed them to not look old, but new and exciting! to draw students in.
I scoured the internet and was rewarded for my time with these beauties by Elin O'Hara Slavick - not only a contemporary artist, but cyanotypes with CONTENT! It was like dream come true.
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Cyanoytpes are made by contacting printing either negative or object, meaning you place what it is you want to capture right on top of the sensitized material and let the sun make your exposure. What you get in return in less a photograph of the image, as we understand photographs, and more of an X-Ray of the image, in this case an image called a Photogram. A photogram simply meaning a photographic image made without a camera.
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Elin O'Hara Slavick created these cyanotypes at The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in 2008, using objects donated to the museum by A-Bomb survivors.
As an individual some generations removed from this event, trying to wrap my head around the reality of the atomic bombing is tough. Rather than thinking about it as violence, carnage, heavy metal, and anger - as I tend to think about war - in the present, these cyanotypes deliver the heavier truth, war in the past tense. War as loss, as absence, as silence.
While researching contemporary artists working with the cyanotype process, I also came across the work of Robin Hill, she says something very insightful about the process, saying "cyanotypes show the potential of an object." Right - so instead of seeing an object in a photograph in the same way we see an object in life, the light bouncing off of the objects surface, in the use of the cyanotype process, the contact print/photogram, we see the light that passes through the object. ...We see not what is, we see more, we see - the potential.
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I got interested in the Photographic Process, beyond photography itself, when I got interested in experimental and alternative ways of making photographic images. Thinking about what went into the process, what you could change in the process, what that shift would create - - - - how much more (or less) artistic control you may (or may not) have - - - fascinating.
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While in Japan, Slavick experimented with other alternative photographic processes as well. Below are examples of frottages (rubbings), Slavick made of different elements in the museum. Thinking again how to capture the reality of the A-Bomb, Slavick made rubbings of a bank floor (above) and a fir tree (below), then used the rubbings like cliche verre (handmade negatives) to make contact prints onto B&W silver gelatin paper. ...
Okay, I am geeking out.
I love photo!
GO PHOTO!
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See more of Elin O'Hara Slavick's work, here, and here.
And work of the Atomic Photographers Guild, here.
