#darkroom processes

Early New Zealand

Early New Zealand

How to make a Salted Print

Step 1: Lie on your bed and stare at the ceiling.

Step 2: Think about time as a "block" and how our movement through the "block" creates this sense of linear time. Think about the past and the future within the "block". Maybe they are in reach, like the present seems to be.

Step 3: Continue to stare at the ceiling while the English "gentleman", scientist and inventor William Henry Fox Talbot does all the heavy lifting, inventing and perfecting the Salted Print photographic or "photogenic drawing" process in the mid 1830's.

Step 4: Read a book, look at photographs and imagine you are a French Count dispossessed of title and fortune and cast adrift on this ocean of time.

Step 5: Stare at the ceiling some more while in 1923 James Smith does other heavy lifting in the Taranaki region of New Zealand, taking photos using the glass-plate negative method. Watch a foreign language film with the subtitles off.

Step 6: Get off your bed, put on some clothes and stop drinking raw milk. You're too old to die young and tuberculosis is no longer fashionably romantic.

Step 7: Drive to a faraway town to meet an elderly couple in a park and buy James Smith's collection of glass-plate negatives. You like parks. You photograph a park bench that has something written on it about a gentleman and his little dog.

Step 8: On the long drive home you think about James Smith and what you learned from the elderly couple. James was a "bachelor" they said. Perhaps you already know the first negative you will print, even before you know it.

Step 9: Time needs an observer to exist, so you exist. You are the vehicle, the machine that's passing through. You make ... and you make until you can make no more, and then you pass it on.

Step 10: One Salted Print, handmade by One Kindred Spirit from a glass-plate negative by James Smith - Bachelor, Man of Many Talents.

*Possession*

Cyanotype - One Kindred Spirit