(The Standard) - Photography goes beyond taking photos. The Special Topics in Photography class offered this semester aims to allow students to explore alternative ways of printing their photos in a variety of hand-crafted ways.
It’s a process that hasn’t been taught at Missouri State in 10 years.
“It’s very tricky,” art and design professor Gwen Walstrand said. “You don’t have the reliability of having quality control. But you get to have this blend of photographic reality. Figments from the real world, and fragments that are obviously hand-printed.”
Walstrand said this alternative photo methods class in particular helps students open up a new world of possibilities, showing even more avenues they can take to fulfill their creative pursuits. By learning alternative printing methods, students will have the tools to continue learning beyond what’s covered in class.
“There’s so many more out there that I’m not teaching that they can ease their way into,” Walstrand said.
The course is split into two main parts. The first focuses on learning various techniques for developing photos, from Van Dyke Brown printing, a process from the late 1800s which involves coating the paper in a silver-based chemical mixture and exposing to a UV light to produce the image, to making a salt print, a method from the earlier 1800s that entails coating a paper in a salt solution, brushing with silver nitrate and exposing one side to direct sunlight to produce the image.
These processes are considered alternative methods of photo printing. Senior photography major Kevin Jolley said while today’s methods of making prints is more streamlined, these alternative ways of printing can be time-consuming.
“You have to coat the paper with sensitized material, you have to let it dry, expose it for a really really really long amount of time, 20 minutes or 30 minutes sometimes, and then do a really extended series of washes and baths, so the whole process can take over an hour,” Jolley said. “It feels more rewarding in some ways because there’s more work put into one little object.”
These methods based in history don’t see as much use today, but Walstrand said they’re making a resurgence with people interested in using hand-crafted methods of printing photos.
“You can’t do this digitally,” Walstrand said. “You can get close, but the exact characteristics of this can’t really be mimicked by other processes.”
For this semester, the class is learning seven alternative methods of printing photos. Once they’ve finished learning about each process, the rest of the semester is dedicated to working on a project of their choice utilizing these methods.
While not all students have decided what their project will be yet, Walstrand said she’s encouraging students to explore multimedia options.
Jennifer Wolkin, a graduate student in the class, isn’t focused on photography. She hopes to work the skills she’s learned in the class into a three-dimensional project involving a vase-like vessel with large shards protruding from the sides. On these shards will be the images.
Learning alternative printing methods is particularly important for Wolkin’s project, which will be fired in a kiln. Certain methods will burn up while going through, so using the correct print to accompany her project is vital.
Last week Wolkin held a demonstration on book-binding for the class.
“It’s really important for photographers to sequence images in the way they want to, to be able to draw connections between those images,” Wolkin said.
This is one example of a multimedia project students are pushed to pursue. Ultimately the project can involve whatever creative pursuit the student wants to follow.
While alternative printing is niche, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value, said Kevin Jolley. Different kinds of prints will give different effects, and for Jolley experimenting with more historical methods is part of the fun.
“It’s definitely less about technical perfection just because the processes are so reliant on factors that are beyond their control,” Jolley said. “It’s more about how it turns out, and the fact that you went through all the work to make something.”
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