March 9th saw our latest Lightworks soiree, when darkroom members gather to show and discuss their photography. Despite a few last-minute drop-outs, it was a lively and inspiring evening, that highlighted the quality and diversity of work being produced here.
Andrew Baranowski kicked the event off with his delicate selenium-toned print of an infra-red shot he took last year on one of the islands in the River Thames near Taplow. The group felt that it had the aesthetic qualities of a Japanese landscape. Andrew mentioned that he has recently purchased a Linhof 5x4 field camera and described the challenges of getting to grips with its ‘tilt and shift’ mechanisms. He is also doing some interesting experiments making digital negatives to print cyanotypes from, which he said he would bring along next time.
Next up was Giacomo Mantovani who has been working on a massive project started during the COVID19 pandemic in 2020. He brought in a portfolio of some of the beautiful 20 x 20 prints he has made from over 1600 negatives he shot during the first lockdown. He explained his testing process and how he keeps meticulous notes to help him recreate earlier results when reprinting certain images. Giacomo has also integrated an AI app that enables the viewer to compare images in the collection with a post-lockdown view of the same location. You can read more about his LKDN20 project in this earlier post which includes the news that the National Gallery in London recently accepted one of his prints to their collection.
By contrast Jean Ross-Timmes demonstrated that size isn’t everything, with her two beautifully composed landscapes, one urban and the other coastal. Although seemingly unrelated, it was noted that both images had strong rectilinear formal elements in their composition. It was pointed out that these smaller prints encourage viewers to a get closer to the work and as a consequence the looking experience becomes more intimate. We look forward to seeing how Jean develops this series over the coming months.
At our last Lightworks Britt Lloyd showed us some prints from a project she is working on photographing the back of men’s heads who have very short hair. This time she brought in some portraits she has recently been printing, which were taken in her small daylight studio that is perfect for capturing the musculature that fascinates Britt. Once again the images were exquisitely printed on fibre paper, with a mixture of front and rear portraits that managed to perfectly suggest the strength and vulnerability of the sitter.
Milena Michalski is constantly looking for innovative ways to expand her photographic practice and we have already reported on her success in getting some of this published in a previous post. For this occasion Milena brought in three strands of her work that often draw on common source imagery which she then works with using different technical processes. There were very flat, matt, underexposed prints of Bauhaus architecture, that were sometimes double-exposed to emphasise the building’s formal qualities. These same buildings became the subject matter for the exploration of the potential of glass plate positives in a project that is still evolving. Finally, Milena showed some of her Phytogram prints of plants that are both the image and the emulsion. We look forward to doing a piece about this fascinating process in a future post. Watch this space!
Another most enjoyable and illuminating evening that showed the extraordinary talent working at darkroom. We’re already looking forward to the next Lightworks on June 8th and hoping that you will show us your work then! Book Here Now