Alternative Processes

Upper Sargent Pond (Gum Bichromate Print)

The latest direction in my work is exploring the potential of alternative printing processes, including platinum palladium, cyanotype, and gum bichromate. All of these processes involve applying a coating of light-sensitive emulsion to watercolor paper (or other surfaces). This means my process goes from analog (film) to digital to analog, which sounds maybe unnecessarily complicated but for me, the process is fun and the results are moving in the right direction.

A Word About Water

My main subject for the past three years has been water: mostly the Raquette River and Buttermilk Falls in Long Lake, NY. This series was shot on film.

Vegetations: Where it started, where it's going

Vegetations is a working title for a project that has been on the back burner for years. In my head, the name is a combination of vegetables and meditations but I know it just comes across as a generic reference to plants. So this title may someday be improved.

The project began as a COVID garden, my first attempt at growing vegetables. Most of what grew wasn’t especially beautiful but I was impressed anyway to see the process actually happen. Since I wasn’t getting out to shoot very much, I made the harvest the subject of a series of photos. I did one shot a day for about a month, with some sample of the day’s harvest arranged on a table in natural light, shot from directly overhead.

The series didn’t really come together for me as color photos, but I kept going back to the images, first altering them with various digital filters and then most recently printing them using alternative photo printing methods including cyanotype and platinum palladium prints. I’m planning to continue on with more cyanotype versions soon.

Uninhabited

There is a professor I know who gave a talk where she asks, “Why do we care about this place but not that place?” A simple question that cuts right to the heart of some big ones about how we relate to nature. Like why do we decide some waterfronts are attractions while others are industrial wastelands? And what are the implications of our choices—past, present, and future—in a time of reckoning in a warming planet.

But the question why do we care also seems like a good way to describe the problem at the heart of any representation of a landscape: In any image of any place, the basic question is, why this place?

This project is the result of a personal process of exploring and trying to understand things I didn’t understand before about my home, New Jersey: this densely populated place (the most dense in the U.S.), wedged between two big cities in the heart of the Northeast Corridor; defined in most people’s minds by its NJTP and Garden State Parkway exits.

Despite all the people, industry, and miles of roads it’s still a place where nature bleeds through, in interstitial spaces along the highways; in networks of rivers and streams that create an alternate roadmap; in the improbable Pine Barrens – 1400 square miles of (almost) nothing . 

In pursuing this project I focused on these uninhabited places. It turns out that even in New Jersey there are a lot of them. In my mind, these places evoke a narrative about what things were like before the intrusion of people and industry, and what they might be like someday in our absence.

Having grown up in South Jersey and lived here for most of my adult life, I’ve internalized these places; this is the landscape that I’m inevitably reacting to when I look at any other place. So this series is part document, part reaction, and part interpretation, but all in some way relating to the question of why I care about this place.