The Nomadic Frog Blog

Brenton Hamilton’s Alternative Process class recently took a field trip to Alan Vlach’s workshop in Trenton, Maine, to make photo gravure prints.

(The metal plates are pretty sharp on the edges, and despite a warning (and what I normally consider a healthy supply of common sense) I managed to slice open the tip of my thumb.)

In this particular process the image is printed on a transparency film (making a digital…positive, in this case, since the plate becomes the negative). This transparency is placed in contact with the light-sensitive plate and exposed to UV light.

Alan shows the class some examples of gravure prints, then demonstrates the technique known as “palming”, in which the ink is manually rubbed off the highlight areas of the plate.

The UV hardens the polymer surface where it gets through the image on the transparency. Where the UV is blocked it remains soluble, so in the development (water) that unexposed polymer washes away, leaving the three dimensional etched plate.

The rest of the process is, as far as I know, regular ink printing on a hand-rolled press. I’m amazed, among other things, at how fine the detail is even after roughly rolling on the ink, buffing it with coarse cheesecloth, and palming it with our bare hands. It’s a neat process!

John works the press and then shows off his final print.

I had an idea to make a portrait of my friend/boss Brenton. It didn’t go as planned.

The idea was to tile a bunch of lab trays on a wall to use as a background for a portrait of Brenton Hamilton. I started off laying them on the floor of the soundstage to see if it would work, and how many trays I would need (turns out around 75).

I had all the trays lined out on the floor and started to gaffer tape them to the wall flat. Kelsey and Scarlett stopped by to supervise.

I knew gravity wasn’t my friend, so I tried to set up and test as much as possible before raising the wall into its vertical position. Here I used a glove on a lightstand as a substitute subject.

Needed a real person, though, to see about the light. (Refer to my recent blog post about my “penchant” for taking selfies.)

I need some fill.

Tested out some different camera angles and distances. The vertical 2x4s are the dimensions the wall will be when it’s up.

I put the wall up. Trays immediately start falling down. I have problems – still have lights to set up, and the big white tray I had intended to isolate Brenton against is too low and too small.

The periodic clatter of crashing trays quickly makes it clear that this isn’t going to happen.

I sit and ponder the 10+ hours of work that is falling apart around me. I set up a timelapse to capture the decay of my idea – you know, making lemonade from lemons – and of course then the trays stop falling – apparently along the top and bottom edges I put more tape on. Sujata stopped by to see what was happening and two trays (bottom left) fell, startling her.

I have a mini and mostly-silent meltdown.

Brenton finally got out of his meeting and came to have his portrait made, unaware that it was a disaster.

Went ahead and made a quick portrait of Brenton anyhow. So far from what I had in mind, but yet somehow still oddly not inappropriate.

Kelsey stopped by again to…help? dance around and provide moral support? Adam delivered the 4×5 film I was now not in need of.

I has a sad.

In the end, there was a pile of gaffer tape.

I bought a new backdrop for a client project. Wanted to see how it looked with a person in front of it – I was available for myself.

I have been told that my penchant for making self-portraits says something about me, in a psychological sense. That my choice to photograph myself is in itself meaningful. Or that it’s just pure narcissism.

What I have to say about myself and my work – and I do think I have a certain amount of introspective authority on the subject – is the following:

1. I am available to myself. I like to photograph other people and do so frequently. Ultimately I am more interested in these photos. Many times, however, I just need a face or a body – any body – whose body isn’t important.
2. If it is an experiment of some kind I don’t need the hassle of finding another person, nor do I need to impose on them. I can sit there for hours tweaking lights or changing depth of field and only have my own schedule to worry about. If it becomes a thread in my work then perhaps making portraits of others would be more relevant.
3. “The image means nothing…it’s just exciting to look at.” -Mike and Doug Starn.

Fractured: In this new body of work I explore the fractured way in which we view the world. More specifically these pieces address the state of chaos the contemporary photography practice finds itself in. Being self-portraits they also naturally speak to my own inability to focus and hint at a deep-seated anxiety about…

Fractured 2013

Oh, who am I kidding – I did it ’cause I thought it might look cool. (I made this statement coincidentally a few days before hearing the Starn twins’ expression of the concept.) I wanted to see what would happen if I folded the paper before painting on the light-sensitive emulsion – to see how the image would be pulled apart as a result.

The choice of self-portrait is not random, in this case, but also not some deep-seated psychological thing either. Once I folded the rather large sheet down I realized it was pretty small. So many of my available negatives were out because they were too big. I also knew the final image would be broken up with a lot of white space, so I felt a complex image might be too hard to recognize and read – I needed a more-simple, bolder image to start with.

Finally, I wanted a photo that had some decent fidelity – I wanted a photo, not an abstraction like a cyanotype, for example. I decided on kallitype as being the easiest, fastest, cheapest way to address these needs, and of the suitable negatives (type and size, remember) I realized this self-portrait would be neat. That’s it.

My left thumb: I wanted to see what it would look like to have a very high-res scan of my thumbprint, rendered in a palladium print. I ended up somewhat accidentally using a new form (for me) of the oval frame, which makes me feel something I’m still thinking about. Also remembered the (now) funny story of getting stitches from trying to peel a banana. Did not think about that scar when I scanned – I just picked that thumb so I could run the computer mouse with my right hand.

My left thumb

I happened to be the only person in the lab the day I scanned my thumb. Yes, I could have found somebody else, but at this point it’s just an experiment – I want to see what happens, how it looks. Maybe now I’ll go out and get other people’s thumbprints and see what stories they reveal. Maybe I will move on to another idea.

Me with me with me and coffee: I was the only person at the cabin in the middle of West Virginia nowhere. I was goofing around. I felt like making a fun composite. Not really much more I can say about this one.

Mark has coffee with Mark, Mark, Mark, and Mark

My use of self-portraits is not psychological any further than whatever it might say about my pragmatic approach to making the work – again, I am available to myself. If the viewer wants to look for psychological statements it would be in the content of the image – my pose, expression, etc. – go for it, I’m sure it’s there.

The choice to do self-portraits, for now at least, lies in practicality rather than psychology.

Now that the print copy is finally out I can talk about my recent experiences working on two assignments for Atrium Magazine, the publication for alumni and friends of Ohio University’s College of Health Sciences and Professions.

A while back I got connected with Jody Grenert, the man behind the magazine. He asked me to create a graphic for the cover and to illustrate a story about a new department within the college. I had a blast, it worked out well, I liked working with Jody, and everything was just peachy.

I think it went to my head.

For the next issue I was asked to illustrate two stories, one of which was the cover story on the growth of online education within the college. I had vague mental images of what I felt were fairly cliche illustrations of a classroom and a home computer connected by some cloud of knowledge. I wanted something better, bolder, and less predictable.

During the brainstorming phase I had dinner with Rob Griffith, a old friend from high school. His immediate response was to do something to the effect of a wise man on a mountain top. My concept became “even the guru on the mountain top has something new to learn, and doesn’t need to leave his mountain top to learn it!” Now all I needed was a mountain and a guru.

I headed off to West Virginia to meet up with my friend Liz. Liz and her boyfriend Chris have helped out on a couple of earlier photo shoots, and if there was anyone crazy enough for this project it would be her.

I did a little homework (emphasis on “a little”). The weather forecast was mostly clear, with highs in the low 40s. What I stupidly didn’t consider was that a “high of 40″ did not mean it would be 40 on top of a mountain, and certainly not at 8am when I had scheduled the shoot. Morning light and all that, you know.

Long story short: I trudged out to the location (the last mile of road was closed due to snow) only to realize I’d left the one and only prop (my laptop) in the car. A couple of hours and six miles of hiking with my gear later I had the shots I wanted, as best I could do in windy 28F snowy conditions, at least. Got back to the car to discover a nail in my now flat tire. Got caught by blizzard and stranded at a friend’s cabin for a couple of days. Big drama, lots of fun… in hindsight.

Fortunately Liz brought a colleague along who was happy to be my assistant / sandbag.

The final cover and story:

For the other story – on multidisciplinary work – I thought it would be brilliant to have six or seven models, each with their own “profession’s” props to shoot a concept on which my client was, let’s say, far from convinced. I wanted to be more illustrative, more conceptual, rather than a more literal approach.

There is at least one glaring goof in this photo – see if you can spot it. (I’m talking about props, not photographic mistakes, so the peanut gallery can just hush about any of those flaws you may see.)

The compromise, and one example of why I like working together on a team, was to also photograph more traditional settings – students actually doing the work they do – and I think the combination works pretty well.

Hopefully for the next issue I will keep my budget in mind and not spend more driving all over the place getting the shots than I actually get paid for the job. It was, at least, a fun lesson to learn.

A while back I had lunch with a couple of my profs from grad school. Larry… or maybe it was Gary… suggested I get in touch with industries active in the Marcellus Shale exploration of eastern Ohio, western PA, West Virginia, and southern New York. It’s certainly one of the few growth industries in the area. I finally brought some relevant images together, designed a couple of promotional post cards, and started the campaign earlier this week.

It’s something of a chicken and egg situation: many times the locations I’d like to be photographing restrict access – and how to get access if I don’t have images to show to get hired? Fortunately, primarily as a result of photographing for Rocky Brands and the Russ College of Engineering at Ohio University, I have a stock of images to use that show a variety of situations.

Once I started thinking about those companies I started to expand to other industries as potential clients. A lot of them tend to be global entities, and that means travel. Somebody once told me of a job they had – they spent something like two months flying around the world photographing a company’s installations for their annual report. Earned a decent rate and got paid to travel all over the place. Sounds about right to me.

It’s been easy to find email addresses for people in “media relations”, “external marketing”, or similar departments at the companies (no idea if there will be a response, of course), and phone numbers are generally available, but it’s surprisingly hard to find snail-mail addresses in some cases, especially for the larger corporations.

With a little bit of luck (or more likely, a lot of emails, phone calls, post cards, etc.) I’ll eventually be posting photos of me hanging off the top of a wind turbine on a mountain ridge or SCUBA diving to photograph some installation in the Red Sea. Or driving around the hills of southeastern Ohio some more – works for me.