I recently visited the Paula Rego and Goya exhibition at the Holbourne Museum in Bath. It was nightmarish. Not just scary, but surreal, both artist producing dream-like, sinister images that felt like they had reached into the furthest corners of the subconcious mind to wrench out images.
They were also intensely light and dark, working with monochrome in a beautiful way- I always like to see the constraints of printmaking pushed to their limits.
The ability to depict light (and therefore darkness) is one of my favourite pleasures when printmaking, but also of photography, the ultimate medium of light and shadow, and one which shares qualities with etching and intaglio print in particular.
I often look at photography books for inspiration- one of my favourite being a richly produced catalogue of Atget’s work, with commentary by John Sarkowski. A working commercial photographer, Atget documented Paris and it’s environs on his own terms, composing still, haunting images with his glass plate camera, that produced photographs that looked much older than the year of their production (they often look like 19th century photos, when in fact they are all made in the 20th century and mostly in the 1900’s and 20’s).
Each one is a beautiful poem of light, dark, form, reflection, echo and stillness and I go to them when I need order and refreshment.
I also own books of photographs by Weegee, Mary Ellen Mark, and anthologies of anonymous photographs and 19C cityscapes. These photos speak to me of how to compose images, to work within frame, to work with tone and monochrome, how to imply something that you can’t see, how to reach back in time. Reducing down to form and tone within frame is both poetic and a lesson on artistic constraint.
Writing this post, I realise my life has been soaked in photography – my Dad was a keen amateur photographer, (making a dark room in the loft at one point) and we were subjected to the slide show of the holidays every September (and no I don’t mean a Power point, I mean settling down into a darkened study, whilst Dad operated the slide machine as the images were projected onto the screen in front of us).
At University I wrote one of my dissertations on 20th Century photographers (no doubt how I discovered many of the ones I love now) and much of my illustration work either was photography or involved it. All analogue at that stage of course- I loved the feeling of entering into the dark room, the smell of chemicals, warm darkness and the anticipation of the magic to come.
Pre-lockdown, I became very interested in making cyanotypes (the 19th century photographic technique that uses UV light to make blue toned photographs). I’ve made a fair few now (currently sat in my studio waiting for a good opportunity to come out and be seen).
They are prints of, and made with, light. It’s the depiction of light that sparked something in me as a child, a kind of wonder that it was possible to show that intangible and ephemeral thing- it still moves me now. Whether making cyanotypes, composing images with my phone camera, or wiping ink from a drypoint plate to imply a certain quality of light.
Photography and printing are interwoven for me, and they speak to each other again and again. Threads that lie side by side, merging and intertwining.