From The Archives: Damaged

Here’s another installment of From the Archives, a (very) occasional series wherein I post old work and write some comments about how it was made and what I was thinking about.

Back in 1993, I was a photography student eagerly leaning new photo techniques. I had an assignment for a class that involved exploring a technique, then reporting back to the class on my success. I decided to try reticulation, which is supposed to result in a fine, almost spider web like pattern of cracks over the surface of a negative. Reticulation is achieved chemically (using sodium carbonate) or through subjecting negatives to extremes of hot and cold water. I decided to try the temperature method of reticulation. I shot a roll of black and white film, mostly random landscapes in the countryside around Ann Arbor, MI, as well as some shots in a local cemetery, and a few shots in downtown Ypsilanti, MI.


After developing the film, I heated a pot of water on the stove, and set a bowl of ice water on the counter next to the stove. I had left the negatives uncut, and plunged the entire 24 exposure strip into the pot of hot water. After a couple of minutes, I removed them from the hot water and placed them into the ice water. Nothing happened. I tried a couple more times, but still, no change in the negatives. So, I heated the water until it was just below the boiling point, and tossed the negatives in. Almost immediately, the gelatin began melting and sliding off of the film. I hurriedly grabbed the film with a pair of tongs, but by this time, the emulsion was so soft that the edges of the film base was hitting the emulsion and removing it in large chunks. I figured the film was a lost cause, so I started pressing my fingers into it, leaving fingerprints in the emulsion. After all this, one final bath in the ice water still did not succeed in achieving reticulation.


My mistakes were pretty easy to figure out. First, I likely developed the film using a hardening fixer (many fixers have a hardening agent designed to strengthen the negative so as to prevent damage). A non hardening fixer may have allowed reticulation to occur. Secondly, I should have rolled the developed film back onto a developing reel before putting it into the pot of hot water, This would have prevented the film from hitting itself and removing chunks of emulsion.


I filed these negatives away, chalking it up to a failed experiment (I’ve never actually tried reticulating negatives again myself, although I’ve had students make it work). I have used shots from this roll a few times, however. This is a kwik-print made about a year after the failed reticulation attempt. It’s a collage made using one of the damaged negatives as a starting point.


Here’s the original shot for comparison:


A few years later, I used another of these shots in a mixed media piece. Here’s the original shot: (with my thumbprint in the emulsion):


Here’s what I made with it:


Looking at these shots now, I like a lot of them quite a bit. The layer of visual noise, and the changes in texture and composition resulting from the missing chunks of emulsion make these mundane scenes interesting. Maybe this was a happy accident after all.

Fuji Transfers

When Tom and Christie were married in September, Christie asked me to make Polaroid lifts of their wedding photos. It sounded like a great idea to me, except for one thing: Polaroid film is no longer being manufactured. I’d heard that Fuji instant film would work, but that the process was somewhat different than when using Polaroid film. So, I did some online research, and gave it a shot.

The basics are the same. If you’re using a Daylab (or in my case, a Vivitar slide printer I bought on Ebay), you need to start with slides. If you have a good quality flat screen monitor, it’s very easy. Load slide film into your camera, set it on auto, mount it to a tripod, open the images in Photoshop, hide all the menus, and shoot. The slides come out perfect. Based on my research, I over saturated the color on the photos a little before I shot slides of them, to compensate for a tendency of the transfers to look washed out.


The fuji film I used is FP-100C. It’s a color instant film the same size as Polaroid 669 film, and fits easily into the slide printer (Fuji also makes an instant black & white film, which I haven’t tried). Exposing the film was a little tricky. The Fuji film has a slightly different ISO than the Polaroid film, and the VIvitar slide printer has limited exposure adjustment. Try as I might, the prints all come out lacking details in the highlight areas, not a good thing when you’re making prints of a wedding dress. I actually think that the Fuji prints are high in contrast, as the dark areas of the prints also lost detail. The next time I try lifts with this film, I’ll try lowering the contrast of the images before shooting the slides to see if it improves things.

Aside from the contrast issue, the Fuji prints looked pretty good. The color balance is much better than the Polaroid 669 film, which always had a very distinct cyan cast (the Fuji black & white lifts show a cyan cast in the blacks, but I kind of like how it looks).


As for making the lifts, Fuji film is similar, but also quite different from Polaroid. FIrst, I found that warmer water to soak the prints in worked better. I did all my Polaroid lifts at 160 degrees F. Fuji film worked better around 180 degrees. The soak time was shorter, it took about 1-2 minutes in the hot water to loosen the emulsion on the Fuji film. After transferring the print to a tray of cool water, the emulsion easily slid off of the backing, with little fuss. That’s a big improvement over Polaroid film, which can be difficult to remove from the backing.

The Fuji emulsion has a very different feel from the Polaroid. It has an almost cellophane like crispness, unlike the mushy and easily damaged Polaroid emulsion. It can be handled quite a bit, something that would have left you with a tray of Polaroid soup. It’s a little less malleable than the Polaroid film, but not so much that you can’t get some good wrinkles and bends into the image. The one thing I really do not like about the Fuji film is that the edges of the emulsion tend to curl, and it can be very difficult to unroll it and get it to lie flat. Many of my lifts of the wedding photos have a distinct dark edge caused by this curling.

The reading I had done on Fuji lifts said that the Fuji emulsion would not stick to paper like Polaroid emulsion, and needed to be glued down. A couple of sources recommended picking up some of the ‘glue’ that held the emulsion to the backing, and spreading it on the receiving paper. I found this impossible. First off, there is no glue, it’s obviously gelatin. Secondly, the shorter soaking time means the gelatin does not dissolve. I found that coating the receiving paper with acrylic medium before transferring the emulsion to it worked much better.

Overall, I mostly liked the Fuji lifts. The color is a significant improvement over Polaroid 669 film, and the emulsion is easier to handle. I do wish it were a little more malleable, however, and the curling of the edges is really annoying. Maybe, if The Impossible Project decides to resurrect 669 film, they can solve the color issues, and we’ll have a great instant film for doing lifts.

Congratulations, Tom and Christie! I have 22 lifts from your wedding photos to give you when I see you next week.

MVCC Faculty Exhibit

I have a piece in the annual faculty exhibit at Moraine Valley Community College. The show runs November 16 through December 17 in the DeCaprio Gallery in the Fine and Performing Arts Center at Moraine. The reception is on Thursday, Nov. 19, 2-4 p.m.

My piece is a diptych of silkscreen prints I made this past summer. I'll give you a sneak peak: It's the first two images in this post. I titled it Office Romance. Not the most serious work I've done, but I like it. It makes me laugh.

Meet The Faculty!

I'm going to be part of an exhibit, along with my colleagues in the MVCC Art Department, at Joliet Junior College in Joliet, IL. Show dates are Oct. 5-Oct. 30, 2009. If anyone will be in the Joliet area, stop in and take a look. I don't know when the reception will be, but I'll post it as soon as I know.

The Summer Of Screenprinting V

Here are the final prints I made as part of my summer silkscreen class. The last day of the class was used to demonstrate monoprinting and finish up prints in progress. I wasn’t really working on anything, so I printed a transparency of this image to expose onto a screen.


This is an old photograph placed on a scanner and moved while the scan was in process. I decided to print with a blend of two colors of inks, mainly to use up some custom mixed colors. I settled on brown and light blue.
Here’s a print made once the colors had started to blend together.


There was also some red ink, mixed with just a touch of metallic silver, that needed to be used up. I threw some on the screen and ran another print.


Some more red ink added, and a couple of prints pulled to bleed the colors, and this was the result:


This one I like. It’s kind of creepy, the red has a splattered blood look that makes the portraits look ominous.

While making these prints, I had first printed onto a piece of mylar to help with registering the paper under the screen. I forgot to move the mylar with the wet ink while pulling a print onto a piece of scrap newsprint, and found afterwards that the ink from the mylar had transferred to the paper. Here’s the result:


I really like this. I find the wrinkles and visual noise appealing, and I can see myself exploring this idea further in the future. I love happy accidents!

So, that’s it for screenprinting, at least for now. I’ve just set up a screenprinting lab in my basement, and am currently running exposure tests and troubleshooting. Getting exposure times right is kicking my butt a little, but I hope get it worked out and start making more prints soon.

The Summer Of Screenprints IV

Here are a couple more prints from my recent foray into silkscreening.Both of these prints are remakes of pieces from my Postcard project from last summer. You can click the link for more details, but in a nutshell, these are reworked postcard sized collages from twenty years ago. I'll start with the original, a simple black and white photocopy of the collage made in 1988.

From Lightbender

Here's the digital reworking of the collage I did last summer:

From Lightbender

And finally, here's that reworked collage translated into a two-color screenprint:


While there may not seem to be much difference between this and the digital version, when viewing these in person the difference is immediately noticeable. The screenprint has a tactile quality that isn't present in the digital print, and the pink background is much brighter (I mixed white with a florescent pink ink to get that color).

Here's another of the old postcard collages remade. First, the photocopy of the original collage.


Next, my rework of the original from last summer.

From Lightbender

Finally, here is my revised collage done as a screenprint:


I like this quite a bit. I used two inks, pink and purple, and screened them together. It looks great, I like the colors, and the halftone pattern works really well with this image. I plan on experimenting with putting a gloss coat of a 50's inspired pattern over this, but haven't come up with anything I like yet.

Making these screenprints has rekindled my interest in these old collages once again. They seem to somehow make sense as screenprints. I'm in the process of setting up a silkscreening lab in my basement, I wouldn't be surprised if more of these postcards end up as my first prints once the lab is ready to go.

The Summer Of Screenprints III

This is the third post in a series looking at my recent attempts at screenprinting. By now, I’m getting used to the process of silkscreening, and starting to think more about what can be done with it. These prints are some of the favorite ones I’ve made as part of my lessons.

The first two are admittedly kind of puerile, but I can’t help but like them. They make me laugh. They started as photos I took when playing around in my studio, which I often do when I’m between projects and looking for inspiration. I had been shooting photos of small toys placed on magazine pages, then switched to office supplies.




It doesn’t show up much in these photos, but the silkscreen prints are done on black ink against a background of metallic silver ink. The black on silver looks really great, and really makes the images pop.

This next bunch of prints were made from a photograph of a huge statue of a Mesopotamian human-headed winged bull in the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.
The first one is printed with green ink on a piece of newsprint.


The next one is also green ink, but with a mauve background. I did this for fun, and ended up liking the psychedelic feel of the print. The figure isn’t particularly easy to see, but it’s a fun print.


Here’s a third version of the same image. This one is a color blend done by placing blue and yellow ink together on the screen. Several prints are run, the ink becoming more blended with each consecutive print until a gradient results. This is one of the earlier prints in the run, and the colors are sill pretty separated. The newsprint this is printed on had a rectangle of metallic silver ink on it (left over from printing the images at the top of the post) which I thought looked pretty good with this photo screened onto it.


I still have several prints to post, look for more over the next couple of days.