from time to time i get asked what is a photograph.
i sometimes know how to answer, i know what i was told, and taught. i know what i know, i think.
sometimes i have to throw everything i was taught out the window and thing about the word: photograph/
photo graph
light drawing
it really seems pretty easy to figure out. i guess it is a drawing made with light.
can it be done with a digital camera or does it need something else ?
it can be done with anything as far as * I * am concerned .. even cheap construction paper !
today i made a photograph with a scrap of xerox paper. its the cheap stuff … nothing fancy.
i made a rubbing with a pencil and then rubbed wax on it to make it sort of see through.
i took this waxed paper rubbing and contact printed it onto a piece of velum paper coated wtih
cyanotype chemistry … stuck it in a printing frame, and in the sun for about an hour.
THEN
i took the print all greenish and milky and rinsed it in water. the print was now
blue and white … so i took a solution of sodium carbonate, the same sodium carbonate
i use for caffenol, and i brushed it on the print to lighten the tones and bleach the blues to white …
and then paint the picture until it looked like this
