Week 12 – Tuestorial & Colour Darkroom Sesh

This Tuesday I had the entire day off work as I had a few left over for the year and we either “use them or lose them”. Not needing to be in Uni ’til the afternoon for our tutorial with Niki I got in earlier and dived into the colour darkrooms after checking with Dan that all was working ok. I needed no Medium format lenses or neg holders as I was primarily working with colour 35mm negatives today.

Whilst the rest of the L4’s were having their Media and Methods catch up I was banging away in Enlarger B2 to produce six different prints and a few experimental laser pointer exposures.

I was focussed on mostly images of the Barbican in London and then a couple of images from my trip around Scotland in August. After setting up film #37 in the negative holder and tuning the session for the first print I went in to the Colenta machine room to find a print of an oil rig that must have been in the machine when it was switched off last week. It was a duplicate so I hadn’t accounted for it going missing. It was ruined as it looked like it had been in the chemicals for a good length of time. It was no bother though as I had one of that print already.

While I was in the area of the machine, I took the exposed piece of paper that I’d done last Friday and put it through the machine to see my photo of some oil rigs being constructed near Cromarty in Scotland pop out the other side. It was a lovely image but the horizon was on the wonk so if I redo this I’ll have to measure it on the easel to ensure it’s correct.

Cromarty, Scotland.

Back into the dark room I got going and produced some nice prints from colour negs, some of which can be seen in the gallery below.

Whilst I was doing this I was also playing with a little pen torch and a laser pointer in between other prints. I could mess about with this whilst the neg was still in the holder and then print one laser pointer experiment and one proper print. I was disappointed with how the pen torch image had come out as it had just overcooked the paper and it looked like it had been properly burnt by fire to me. The Laser pointer was a little more controlled so I was holding the front of the pointer to the paper to pop a spot on there and then lifting it off a little, but I found that if I bathed the whole sheet in green laser light it just went purple.

Tutorial

Lunch time came around and after. asit and a chat with some of my peers about their progress or lack of it Niki arrived for the afternoon session. She set some time aside for each of us that wanted a chat so I had a brief chat with her about my progress so far and the issue I’m having devising a reason why I’m doing the stuff I’m doing in my Year Long Project, the weaving and distortion etc..

The discussion opened up with me sharing my “Why?” page (pg56) from the sketchbook in which I jotted down the central question and then threw words at it that spring to mind when I consider what I’ve done so far and feelings I have about the work, and maybe ideas of where it could go.

pg56 from Sketchbook

We chatted about my portraits that I sliced up and joined together and that I didn’t get much from the portraits but the words like opposites, similarities, joining, average, mean cropped up when I was explaining it to her. I enjoy making photographs of structures and buildings more and this might be down to my engineering background. Niki stressed that the engineering factor is an important part of my personality and identity so I shouldn’t disregard it.

The portraits in the portfolio of work so far were convenient quick images made to be printed cheaply onto laser paper and then test woven to see if the concept had legs. The later images I’ve made on proper photo paper and then worked with, of structures etc, give me more satisfaction.

We discussed the “average” words and I had been thinking in the darkroom earlier about my motivation when the phrase “similarly opposite” popped into my head so I wrote it down. I don’t know what it means as of yet but the images of portraits merged by Alma Haser of identical twins registered with me as they should be identical but the minor differences are evident when pieces of jigsaws swapped over or image parts woven in.

Taboo & Polemic

This further averaging of two almost identical subjects was interesting and it led to me talking about politics. Not a subject I often broach with anyone but in my experience today politics has led to vast divisions between societies and peoples. Social media and current affairs news display constant stories of instances where radicalised people take their anger out on another group and there is a backlash from the media who then stir up other groups and I think it leads to a certain amount of escalation.

Brexit, Scottish IndyRef, Northern Ireland/Republic, North Korea/South Korea, Palestine/Israel, China/Taiwan, Russia/Ukraine, Harry & Meghan/Royal Family, Love Island, Celebrity Jungle, World Cup, Anti-Semitism, Fascism are just some of the topics that are rife in the news of late. Each of these strives to develop a warring set of factions to become polemic enemies of each other.

If these opposing factions could be woven together like an image maybe the discussions could be carried out in a good natured, reasonable and courteous manner to ensure that all parties involved are receptive to the arguments being laid at their feet.

After all, when I shout at my teenage son for breaking something or doing something daft, his instant reaction is to hit defence mode and then fire back, resulting in a row that could be avoided if we just sit down and have. a reasonable chat about it. After some years of moaning at both of my kids for one thing or another I’ve found it better to just treat them as adults and not bark orders or reprimands at them but to try and help them understand how being tidy or washing dishes helps us all be better citizens in our home. Why can’t it be easier for the politicians and groups with opposing ideals to meet in the middle to talk things over and help each other to understand their points of view.

Niki mentioned grey area, middle ground, not middle ground, maybe 33% ground etc and this fits in with the images I’ve done so far. The prime example is the two images of Tokyo I merged together, one day and the other night.

Night and Day Weave

I mentioned about how I wasn’t getting a lot from portraits but I don’t know where to go from here. Niki suggested something that she talks to students about this, and selecting a subject or theme first to photograph makes it easier and then play with them once the images are in the can. I think that this means I’ll take images of buildings and structures and then see if I can “average” them out or take a couple of different images of similar structures then blend them.

We discussed my work so far as starting off doing one thing and then working through and seeing where it leads,sort of like throwing a number of ideas or prints up in the air and seeing which one I like more when they land on the deck. The things that I like I carry on doing, and the others I can drop knowing that I’ve at least tried them out.

Niki then suggested that if I have these sorts of questions that I can get in touch with her at any time, either on email or insta and she’ll try and help me get my head around a conundrum I might be experiencing. The discussions we had today have helped me out no end and I feel that merging and averaging similar or opposite images could be the way forward. Hence the reason for this blog post, it’s a good record of what I’ve been thinking about.

The future of my work for now is choosing some colour/black and white images to play with and see how I can do the joining to be an effective method of getting my thoughts across.

Black Spot

Whilst I was sitting here I was reminded of some of my later prints having orange spots on the margins, and thinking it must be a light leak in the black bags causing it so I shone my torch into the black plastic bag and spotted a couple of small holes in the edge of the bag. I taped up the side with duct tape to prevent this from happening again. I’ve already had to do it on the bottom of the bags as when I’ve been dropping my exposed paper in the sharp corners of the heavy paper have been poking holes in the bottom and causing some weird fogging.

Using the light to shine in the bag and highlight hole locations I thought of it’s magnetic base and how iron filings would be attracted to it. (I don’t know why this popped in there) then I wondered if there were any artists creating Iron Filing Photograms. Pictures on photographic paper produced from enlarger and negatives where parts of the images were masked off with the usual magnetic field lines and the pattern represented on the iron filings…

Magnetic Fields

I’ve bought for less than a tenner, four small bar magnets and a small amount of iron filings so over the christmas break I’ll set up my enlarger at home (Durst M605) to print an image of interest and then hold a bar magnet under the paper to create the iron filing mask patterns before exposing the paper. Then once the paper is exposed I’ll brush off the iron filings, develop, stop,fix and wash the paper to see what happens.

I’ve not found anyone who has made iron filing photograms on the internet yet but will continue my investigations.. I know people video the patterns made by magnets and also vibrations on particles that produce very specific mathematical patterns but I wonder if anyone has ever used them to mask of areas of images.

Conclusion

Time to try and figure out what images I want to work with, I’ll go out over Christmas break and shoot some. See what it is that I’m drawn to, it’s likely to be dark photos with lights and rain in them, as well as the multi storey car park again.

The chat I had with Niki started off relatively low-key and then meandering discussions led me to logically come up with conclusions that made sense, as to why I thought this way about portraits and this way about structures. Even a short chat that I didn’t think would yield much was able to clarify and give me some direction.

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