alternative processes & photographic techniques

Alternative Processes & Photographic Techniques

Throughout photography’s history, technological improvements have caused many photographic

processes to fall out of widespread use. This print viewing features artworks made by

contemporary artists who utilize 19th Century processes. Also included are artists who have

invented their own processes or use hybrid processes in order to achieve particular visual or

conceptual effects.

Artist: Aspen Mays

Title: 1%

Date: 2008

Medium: C-Print; Photograph

Dimensions: Frame: 24 ½ x 28 ½ in

Paper: 20 in x 24 in

Credit Line: Museum Purchase

Danh, Binh

Vietnamese-American, b. 1977

Bin Danh's inventive photographic work centers on the lingering evidence of the war in Vietnam

and surrounding areas in Southeast Asia, evoking how remnants of the war are found in the

shape of memory, tangible traces in the landscape, and historical records. Using the relationship

of form and content in his work to quietly raise challenging questions, Danh offers a meditation

on how these different manifestations of a violent past can overlap and affect each other.

Danh begins with found photographs from Vietnam and the Cambodian "killing fields," which he

gathers from archives, military records, and newspapers. He then prints these images directly

onto tropical leaves, using a photographic procedure that employs the plants' natural processes.

To create these "chlorophyll prints", as he calls them, Danh presses living leaves between glass

plates along with a photographic negative (generated digitally from the source photograph), and

exposes them to sunlight over the course of weeks or months. The areas that are blocked by the

negative are prevented from producing chlorophyll in the process of photosynthesis, leading to

different colorations in the light sensitive pigments in the leaves and causing the image to come

into view. In pieces such as Drifting Souls #4 (2005), the faded appearance of the image and

the fragility of the dried leaf give the impression of a scene wavering between presence and

absence. The photograph here appears as a ghostly after-image in the leaf, embodying Danh's

perception that "the memory of war lives on in the landscape."

Title: Drifting Souls #4

Date: 2005

Medium: Chlorophyll Print; Resin

Dimensions: Frame: 8 in x 14 in


Title: Memory of Tuol Sleng Prison, Child 7

Date: 2010

Medium: Chlorophyll Print; Resin

Dimensions: Frame: 8 in x 10 ½ in

Credit Line: Gift of the Artist

Mann, Curtis

American, b. 1979

For his series, “Modifications,” Curtis Mann appropriates and refashions vernacular photographs

of Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, and Kenya—places where a conflict seems deeply rooted and

even impossible to resolve. Mann states, "I question what I've learned about these places and I

realize I usually have to erase most of that knowledge and begin again—more open-minded,

more curious, and more hopeful than before." Submitting the found images to intensive physical

alterations Mann filters them through a new visual vocabulary. Because his photographs resist a

sense of stable meaning, they invite individual interpretation and a more abstract, even

imaginative consideration of what it means to live in a place overcome by war.

After collecting photographs from photo-sharing websites, estate sales, and online auctions,

Mann enlarges them and paints certain parts of the photographs with a clear varnish. When he

submerges these prints in household bleach the varnished areas resist the bleach while the

untreated portions of the image are washed away. As a result, large sections of each photograph

are replaced by a bright white void or a blank space ready for projection, while at its edges

gradients of red and yellow bear faint traces of the original image. The varnished areas depict

clusters of people or fragments of buildings, fully visible but isolated in these otherworldly

landscapes.

Title: Escape, Attempt (Somewhere, Israel)

Date: 2007

Medium: C-Print, Graphite, Mixed Media

Dimensions: Paper: 18 in x 22 in

Credit Line: Museum Purchase w/ funds from

Herbert & Virginia Lust

Title: Rebuild (Somewhere, Israel)

Date: 2007

Medium: C-Print, Graphite, Mixed Media

Dimensions: Paper: 18 in x 22 in

Credit Line: Museum Purchase w/ funds from

Herbert & Virginia Lust

Mays, Aspen

American, b. 1980

Aspen Mays uses everyday materials to investigate photography’s role as scientific evidence and

documentation. Starting with a sense of curiosity and using research as a catalyst for her work,

Mays poetically translates scientific investigation into photographic works that raise far larger

questions than they attempt to answer. In her color photogram of TV static, entitled 1% (2008),

Mays refers to NASA’s claim that one percent of television static is caused by cosmic radiation

left over from the Big Bang. Seeing remnants of the explosion that created our universe

broadcast over a device that has dominated modern media culture demonstrates the curious

ways our ongoing cosmic story is transmitted and made visible through technology. Later, when

the artist was conducting research on a Fulbright Fellowship at the European Southern

Observatory in Chile in 2010 and 2011, she created another body of work concerned with the

cosmos, Punched Out Stars. While exploring the facility’s grounds, she discovered an abandoned

photography darkroom with old pictures of stars tucked in hidden corners throughout the room.

Using a hole punch, she removed the stars, leaving behind unmarked areas that might represent

gaps in our ability to map outer space and revealing that much of the information connecting us

to distant cosmic occurrences remains unintelligible.

Title: 1%

Date: 2008

Medium: C-Print; Photograph

Dimensions: Frame: 24 ½ x 28 ½ in

Paper: 20 in x 24 in


Title: Punched Out Stars #10

Date: 2011

Medium: Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: Frame: 7 ¼ in x 9 in

Credit Line: Gift of the Artist & Golden Gallery

Sparagana, John

American, b. 1958

John Sparagana’s “Sleeping Beauty” series is comprised of mass-produced fashion magazine

pages that have been crumpled by hand until the images become soft and hazy and the paper

feels like cloth. Rich in reversals and seeming contradictions, the process of their creation is one

of destruction. Yet while the extreme fatigue obviously demonstrates break down, the traces of

image and withstanding unity of the paper nonetheless evoke persistence, speaking as much to

the deeply entrenched impact of advertising as to the physical material of the media that convey

its messages. Sparagana highlights such contrasts by preserving a pristine strip from the

distress endured by the rest of the page. This triptych of untitled double-page spreads shifts the

strip of clarity from one figure to another with a cinematic sweep. Seen together the group

provides a telling glimpse of information lost from the original image and what is gained in

Sparagana’s alternating decisions to neglect or transform.

Title: Untitled, 2005

Date: 2005

Medium: Mixed Media

Dimensions: 6 ¼ in x 9 ¼ in & 8 in x 9 ¼ in


Hamilton, Ann

American, b. 1956

Ann Hamilton created a mouth-held pinhole camera, holding a canister containing a strip of film

in her mouth and using her lips as an aperture to create a series of self-portraits in 1998. By

2001, however, she shifted her interest from strictly the self to sometimes include others in the

series “Face to Face.” Face to Face #60 depicts her hands and a desktop framed by the striated

edges of her lips. The shape of the opening suggests an eye, alluding to the visual nature of a

photograph, while the act of opening her mouth recalls speaking–a reminder that Hamilton is

both revealing an intimate view and authoring it.

Title: Face to Face #60

Date: 2001

Medium: Gelatin Silver Print; Camera Obscura

Dimensions: Frame: 18 in x 22 in x 1 ¼ in

Image: 3 ½ in x 10 in


Greene, Myra

American, b. 1975

Myra Greene writes: "throughout my artistic practice, I have returned to the body to explore

issues of difference, beauty, physical and emotional recollections as they play out on the surface

of the skin." In her series, “Character Recognition,” Greene adopts the wet-plate collodion

process, a 19th-century photographic method that was implicated in the history of colonialism

and slavery and used as tool for ethnographic classification. Ethnographic photography was at

times aimed at creating a typological record of racial physiognomy; Greene amplifies and

examines these preoccupations by photographing her own nose, lips, ears, and skin—which she

describes as "the features of race"—as if dismembered from the rest of her body.

Although Greene is working with a highly-coded historical process, one that evokes a

complicated and disconcerting past, her photographic studies reorient it in a number ways. She

uses a black glass plate, instead of the conventional transparent glass, which results in a unique

positive image instead of a negative that could be used to make endless reproductions.

Moreover, in making self-portraits, she willingly stands before the camera and controls the

process. Her photographs capture not only parts of the body but their small expressive gestures.

Effectively allowing the body to "speak back" in this manner, Greene reacts to and rejects the

previous modes and manners of classification, displacing the collodion photograph's role in

these practices as an exploitative, quasi-scientific record; in its place she offers a rich sensory

experience that hints at the individual and the personal.

Title: Untitled (Dark Bearing Teeth)

Date: 2008

Medium: Ambrotype

Dimensions: 3 in x 4 in


Title: Untitled (Intense Eye w/ Part Nose)

Date: 2008

Medium: Ambrotype



Title: Untitled (Frontal Nose Intense Eye)

Date: 2008

Medium: Ambrotype



Title: Untitled (Profile Mostly Dark Nose)

Date: 2008

Medium: Ambrotype



Title: Untitled (Right Ear Shredded Side)

Date: 2008

Medium: Ambrotype



Simpson, Lorna

American, b. 1960

Always interested in exploring identity through the instant assumptions provided by her use of

visual clues, Lorna Simpson took James Van der Zee's photographs as her starting point for 9

Props. Van der Zee was an African-American photographer who made studio portraits of an

emerging Black middle class in Harlem in the early twentieth century, complete with painted

backdrops and domestic furnishings that suggest the prosperity of his subjects. Made while she

was an artist-in-residence at Pilchuck, a glassblowing school in Seattle, Simpson had the

artisans recreate the vases that appear in Van der Zee's pictures. She then photographed the

objects and later accompanied them with texts. Simpson printed the photographs and texts onto

felt, a strategy she began using in the mid-1990s, partly as a reaction against her work being

pigeonholed in the literalist category of "political art." By endowing the pictures with tactility and

three-dimensionality, Simpson aligns her work with the modernist concern with surface and

forms. Keeping the theme uncertain with hazy images and ambiguous text, Simpson's felt panels

are lush objects that use photography to distill and delete, rather than document, touching upon

issues of class, wealth, and strength of character.

Title: 9 Props

Date: 1995

Medium: Lithograph; Mixed Media

Dimensions: Box (Closed): 11 ¼ in x 15 ½ in

Image: 6 ½ in x 8 ¼ in


Irazu, Pello

Spanish, b. 1963

Photography translates three dimensions into two, representing a world with depth and volume

as a flat image that provides the illusion of space. Meanwhile the photographic image usually

establishes a sense of a visual order, suggesting stable relationships between the various

elements it depicts as they are momentarily aligned from a certain viewpoint. Known primarily

for his drawings, paintings and sculptures, Pello Irazu recently began incorporating photography

into his work. In these explorations, which ambiguously fuse the different media, Irazu highlights

the tension between the two-dimensional surface of the image and its representation of space,

prodding us to consider exactly what we are seeing.

Irazu's sculptures are the starting point for the “La Fábrica (Belgrado)” series, if not precisely

their subject. After constructing a sculpture in his studio—in this case a stack of boxes on a

simple chair—he photographs it with tight framing and using a shallow depth of field. Irazu then

prints the photograph and applies layers of acrylic paint to the surface. The painted portions

both integrate with and destabilize the logical order of the image. Depending on where your eyes

rest within the picture, the paint either appears as a superficial addition, accentuating the

photograph's flatness, or it seems to blend into the sculpture in the photograph in a trompe l'oeil

fashion.

Title: La Fabrica (Belgrado) XI

Date: 2007

Medium: Inkjet Print; Acrylic Pain

Dimensions: Frame: 15 ½ in x 18 ½ in

Image: 9 in x 12 in


Title: La Fabrica (Belgrado) VI

Date: 2007

Medium: Inkjet Print; Acrylic Pain


Image: 9 in x 12 in


Opera, John

American, b. 1975

John Opera’s unique anthotypes are made using antiquarian photographic processes involving

photosensitive material derived from various berries and vegetables. Painting with inks on water

in a glass-bottomed tray over an exposure unit, Opera creates a marbleized composition. He

then exposes the image to light and onto a contact print, creating a negative. The negative is

then placed over paper treated with natural dyes (beets, blueberries, and pokeberries) that fade

away when left to age in sunlight for weeks at a time. John Opera’s unique anthotypes are made

using antiquarian photographic processes involving photosensitive material derived from various

berries and vegetables. Painting with inks on water in a glass-bottomed tray over an exposure

unit, Opera creates a marbleized composition. He then exposes the image to light and onto a

contact print, creating a negative. The negative is then placed over paper treated with natural

dyes (beets, blueberries, and pokeberries) that fade away when left to age in sunlight for weeks

at a time. Opera’s intention in using the anthotype process is first to emphasize the dialectic

between photography’s surface qualities and its qualities as illusionistic and indexical space.

Secondly, the works make reference to the inherent relationship between liquid chamical

reactions inside the natural world and their connected activity that brings a traditional

photographic image into being.

Title: C-2

Date: 2010

Medium: Anthotype


Paper: 7 ½ in x 9 ¼ in


Heinecken, Robert

American, 1931-2006

Robert Heinecken, who is perhaps best known for his assemblages of found images from torn

magazine pages and for photographs containing familiar media iconography, continually

redefined the role of photographer and perceptions of photography as an art medium. Trained in

design, drawing, and printmaking, Heinecken's signature work incorporates public images (from

magazines, newspapers, and television) and his own darkroom activity which changes the

interpretation of the original images. Though Heinecken is rarely behind the lens of a camera, his

process is faithfully photographic. Yet he is often discussed less in terms of photography and

more in terms of conceptual art. To put a name to Heinecken's unique combination of interests

and technique, he was dubbed a "photographist" by philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto

who described the responsibility of the modern artist as "creating art that functions in part as a

philosophical reflection of its own nature."

Title: Periodical #7 Los Angeles, Oct. 17, 1974

Date: 1974

Medium: Mixed Media

Dimensions: 8 ¼ in x 10 ¾ in


Patterson, Christian

American, b. 1972

Christian Patterson’s Fond du Lac Telephone Directory is an exact 244-page facsimile of the

artist’s own phonebook from his hometown in Wisconsin, printed soon after his birth in 1973.

Marked with extensive autobiographical notes and references, doodles, jokes, and marginalia—

with photographs, found materials, and drawings interspersed throughout—Fond du Lac, which

translates from French to “Bottom of the Lake,” provides a snapshot of a time and place before

technology allowed for instant and constant means of communication. Pairing the factual

document of the phonebook with his own subjective interventions in its pages, Patterson speaks

to the transformations in his perception of his hometown from childhood through adolescence

and on to adulthood.

Title: Fond du Lac Telephone Directory

Date: 2014

Medium: Artist Book

Dimensions: 8 ½ in x 10 ½ in


Siegel, Arthur

American, 1913-1978

Arthur Siegel crafted intricate photograms and graphic documentary photographs early in his

career. In the late 1940s and 50s, he introduced creative methods of back-lighting and

projecting light onto surfaces, as well as an innovative use of color in both experimental and

documentary photographs. All of his explorations–-with photograms, applications of Polaroid

film, and combination printing–-were designed to explore the singular characteristics of a

medium based on light.

Title: Jewel

Date: 1948

Medium: Gelatin Silver Print; Photogram

Dimensions: Image: 10 1/8 in x 13 ¼ in

Paper: 10 ¼ in x 13 ½ in


Robinson, Michael

American, b. 1981

Known for his experimental films, Michael Robinson disseminates new meanings from

fragments of pop culture. Through mediating seemingly disparate elements from found and

original footage that borrow from personal and collective memory (clips from the popular 1990s

television show, Full House, Michael Jackson music videos, and Sega videogames, for example),

his films exude both visual and narrative complexity. Much like his multilayered films, Robinson’s

photographic collages source imagery as varied as fruit tree diseases or computer graphics from

the 1980s to fabricate unfamiliar forms that are then assembled over found photographs of

idyllic landscapes to create new, otherworldly contexts.

Title: I Don’t Know Anybody Else

Date: 2013

Medium: Inkjet Print; Mixed Media; Collage

Dimensions: Frame: 13 ¼ in x 17 ½ in

Image: 10 in x 14 in


Rossiter, Alison

American, b. 1953

For more than thirty years, Alison Rossiter has been making work that focuses on the materials

and processes of analog photography. Considering the inherent characteristics of the medium

and experimenting with a variety of techniques, she has made photograms and light drawings in

the darkroom and engaged with the way photographs make use of light by photographing solar

eclipses. More recently she has collected expired photographic papers from the last six decades

and printed them to reveal latent forms caused by gradual exposure to elements like moisture

and humidity.

For Kodak Azo F4, expired in February 1922, processed in 2011 (#1 Mold), her process is

intentionally simple: in the darkroom she dips the small sheets of paper from 1922 in developer,

submerging it partway. The result resembles an ominous landscape. The apparent smoke, or

clouds, on the horizon are latent in the old paper itself, produced by mold that found its way into

the box of materials. The invasive residues of the outside world are what give Rossiter’s prints

their atmospheric qualities, while giving shape to moody environments that never really existed.

Title: Kodak Azo F4, Expired in Feb. 1922,

Processed in 2011 (#1 Mold)

Date: 2011

Medium: Gelatin Silver Print


Image: 3 1/8 in x 5 1/3 in


Alternative Processes & Photographic Techniques

• Look carefully at the image. What pulls your attention? Why?

• What can you tell about how this image was made?

• Why do you think the artist chose to use that particular technique?

• What do you think this work is about?

• What do you think the artist was trying to communicate through this work? Why?

Deeper Reading: Adding Context

We can learn a lot about some images just through what we observe in the photograph. In many

cases learning about the artist, their intentions and the cultural and historic context in which the

work was made adds much to our understanding. For example, knowledge of Bin Danh’s working

process and connection to Vietnam is important to understanding his work. Awareness of the

histories surrounding the two wars referenced in Martha Rossler’s work is critical to

understanding those works.

After students carefully look at the work and consider the above questions, ask them to read

about the artist, the techniques they use to produce their work, and learn about the cultural and

historic context in which the work was made. The teacher or docent could also provide some of

this information. After students have learned some context surrounding the work, ask them to

reconsider the images and how this additional information impacts their understanding.

alternative processes & photographic techniques

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