Nancy Breslin is engaged by memories in the form of cyanotypes, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

As traditional photographic methods wane, it always cheers me to see students embrace older processes. During a recent visit to Washington, DC, I visited the Corcoran Gallery of Art, where they currently have a number of exhibitions on display that I would recommend to any photographer, including “Roots and Links” (through July 14), “How Is the World? Recent Acquisitions of Contemporary Photography” (through May 26), “Cynthia Connolly: Letters on Top of Buildings” (through June 23), and “David Levinthal: War Games” (through September 1, although it had not yet opened when I visited). In addition, much of the gallery space is taken up with “NEXT at the Corcoran 2013,” a show of work by students who are graduating from the Corcoran College of Art + Design. Having limited time, I breezed through the student show. However, I stopped and spent some time with one installation – Traci Marie Lee’s project, called “I really was there; I was never really there,” consisting of 300 cyanotypes printed on handkerchiefs.

One failing I see in much alt process work is that the technique and imagery don’t work together: random photos printed in a non-standard way do not suddenly become compelling. I found Lee’s work so engaging because cyanotype on fabric seemed to perfectly express her idea that memory, despite our urge to hold onto it, remains ephemeral. The handkerchiefs themselves, some vintage, represent the past in a concrete (although fluttery) way. The images Lee has chosen to print can be (appropriately enough) hard to see, but included what looked like old family photos, short texts of memories, and items such as lace and flowers that might be markers of beauty that is behind us. In her statement Lee mentions her grandmother, and as I walked around and under these gently swirling photographs, I felt some connection to the artist and her past.

A pinhole photographer arranged part of her holiday around the chance to be inside a giant camera.

I just returned from a two week trip to the UK.  Most of the time was spent visiting family (we saw over 30 relatives in five cities), but on the way from Cambridge (12 relatives) to Ayr (3 more) we decided to spend a day in Edinburgh.  It is a beautiful city known for many cultural offerings, but the main draw for me was the Camera Obscura.  While this device does feature lenses, the experience is much like being in a giant pinhole camera.  Installed in a tower in central Edinburgh in the 1850’s, this camera obscura consists of a series of lenses and mirrors that project the surrounding area onto a large white surface in the middle of a darkened room.  A staff member can redirect the view so one sees, in color and great detail, everything around, from church spires to people walking on the street below.  I have been inside a pinhole camera before, but it typically takes a long time for my eyes to adjust enough for the image to appear and I never see much color (our monochrome-perceiving retinal rods are much more sensitive in low light, compared to the color-perceiving cones).  This, on the other hand, was a clear and colorful image. It was worth climbing five flights of stairs to see.

A member of the staff points to a landmark seen in the camera obscura in Edinburgh.

The camera obscura is on the top floor of a building which also features “The World of Illusion,” which looked a bit cheesy in the advertisements but proved to be very interesting, including a collection of holograms, an Ames room, an exhibit on different types of 3-D images, and a show of pinhole photography by Derek Reay (some of his work can be seen at http://www.derekreayphotography.co.uk/Pages/gallery-pinhole.html).

This is my cue to remind everyone that Sunday (April 28) is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day.  That day I’ll be giving a talk about my pinhole work at the Delaplaine Visual Arts Education Center in Frederick, Maryland at 2 pm, and also taking some pictures so I’ll have something to submit to the WPPD gallery.  If you have a pinhole camera, pull it out on Sunday and join thousands of people around the world!

Nancy Breslin talks about two shows she is having in the month of April, both featuring pinhole photography.

April is an important month for pinhole photographers, since the last Sunday of the month is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. It’s an extra exciting month for me this year, since I’m having two April exhibitions, both of which feature pinhole photography.

The first one, at the Delaplaine Visual Arts Education Center in Frederick, Maryland, is exclusively pinhole. I have work from five projects: Squaremeals (“a pinhole diary of eating out”), Amenities (hotel diptychs), amusement parks, Galaxies, (a brand new project featuring hugely enlarged images of ceiling lights in restaurants, which because of diffraction end up looking like… galaxies! and coating them with encaustic adds to this effect), and finally a short video that comes from my work as artist-in-residence at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. I’ve exhibited some of these projects before, but this is my first opportunity to exhibit different pinhole approaches together. The show closes on April 28, which is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day this year.

The Winterthur residency leads to my second show, NWAA & Winterthur: A Collaboration, which features work that Carrie Mae Smith and I did during our time as artists-in-residence at Winterthur, which is a large (174 room) former DuPont home which now houses a premiere collection of American decorative arts (furniture, silver, ceramics, etc.). The job Carrie and I had was to be inspired by the museum collection, as well as the gardens and library, and to create artworks in response. Not surprisingly, two of my five projects involved pinhole photography. For one, I photographed antique objects featuring George Washington, such as fabric, a figurine, and a dish, and paired them with similar objects featuring Barack Obama. It was meant to bring to mind how similar George Washington’s day was to our own, in terms of people seeing leaders as heroes and wanting memorabilia related to this. The second pinhole project is the same video being shown at The Delaplaine. The movie contrasts items from antique trade catalogs (some of those held by the Winterthur Library date back to the 1700s) and similar items currently in the collection (which I photographed with my Zero 2000 pinhole camera).

The show at The Delaplaine runs from April 6-28, with a free reception on April 6 from 3-5 pm. The Winterthur show is at the Chris White Gallery in Wilmington, Delaware (at 7th and Shipley) runs from April 5-25, with a free reception on April 5 from 6-9 pm.

If you are in the area, please join me! And on April 28, pull out your pinhole camera so you can submit an image to the Pinhole Day gallery.

Some vintage “alt photo” prints are on view in the mid-Atlantic US this spring.

Gum print of John Sloan by Gertrude Kasebier

I’ve just been to two exhibits which feature some beautiful vintage versions of what we now call “alternative processes.”  The University of Delaware, which holds a large collection of work by Photo Secessionist Gertrude Käsebier, has a current exhibition titled “Gertrude Käsebier:  The Complexity of Light and Shade.”  The show includes a range of her styles and techniques, including studio portraits and more personally expressive work, mostly in platinum or gum.  Käsebier studied painting before venturing into photography in her early 40s, and this seems to show in her gum printing, which can stray far from a literal interpretation of the negative.    In this show I was particularly drawn to a quad of gum portraits of the painter John Sloan, in which she uses the same negative and same process to create very different prints, some very dark, some with notable brushwork.  The show continues through June 28 at the Old College Main Gallery.   http://www.udel.edu/udaily/2013/jan/kasebier-light-shade-012413.html

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, has a delightful new show up now called “Faking It:  Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop.”  I had seen much of this work before, but it was interesting to think of the images in this context.  Steichen’s  platinum print with applied color, “The Pond – Moonrise,”  may have been making the most of his limited ability to deal with low exposure.  The fake clouds in many classic landscape photographs don’t detract from their beauty, but do underline the point that photography has long included manipulation.  Unlike some obviously composited prints on display, the exhibited version of Rejlander’s “Two Ways of Life,” a carbon print made from 30 negatives, looks flawless, probably due to the softness of the carbon process.

Steichen’s The Pond – Moonrise

We will start with the simplest description of a camera: a light-tight box with an aperture. In this case a pinhole. With it we will create images on paper and film.
After learning how you can build your own camera from any light-tight container, we will photograph scenes near the Pajama Factory using some of Nancy’s homemade cameras and develop the paper negatives to get a basic feel for the process. From there we will move on to shooting 120 roll film in pinhole cameras to compare the exposure considerations and resulting images. Using the Lycoming County Fair as a backdrop we will spend the afternoon with Nancy shooting on location. You can see more of her pinhole shots of rides at www.nancybreslin.com/rides.html.

For those who simply can’t part with lenses and mechanical shutters we will also explore using plastic toy cameras to create fine art images. Some of these cameras such as the Diana F+ are able to do double duty and offer the choice of removing the lens for pinhole images.

A public presentation and lecture on the artist’s work will be included on Saturday evening.

On Sunday each student will process their own black and white film and print contact sheets of their own images for critique. No experience required. All materials are provided. Participants are encouraged to bring their own light meter and camera or purchase a Diana F+ with their workshop registration. We will have a couple volunteers with light meters to help you with exposures if you do not have your own. Acceptable cameras are Holga, Holga Pinhole, Diana, Diana F+, Zero 2000 or equivalent pinhole cameras that use 120 roll film. Film will be provided.

Workshop Itinerary:
Friday – Meet & Greet reception for those who can make it. 5 to 8 PM. PPW Studio.
Saturday – Light breakfast provided at the PPW Studio 8 to 9AM. Workshop with Nancy Breslin. Lunch provided.
Public lecture with Nancy Breslin. 7 PM.
Sunday – Light breakfast provided at the PPW Studio 8 to 9AM. Workshop with Nancy Brelin. Lunch provided.
An optional darkroom session will be available for students who wish to print from their negatives on Sunday evening from 5 to 9PM.

Cost $350.00 Register online at www.keepmeinthedark.com or email paphotoworkshops@gmail.com for more info.

Nancy Breslin is a fine art photographer in Newark, Delaware. After spending her first career as an academic psychiatrist, she decided in 1997 to leave medicine to pursue a second career as an artist. She completed an MFA at the University of Delaware in 2000 and received Individual Artist Fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts in 2003 and 2008. She has taught photography part-time at the University of Delaware (darkroom, digital, alternative process and video) and given talks and/or workshops at a number of regional schools, colleges and art centers.
She has had solo or two-person shows in Wilmington and Dover (Delaware), Philadelphia, Arlington (Virginia), Elkton (Maryland), and San Antonio. Her photography has also been in over 60 group shows, including exhibits at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, the Delaware Art Museum, the NJ Center for Visual Arts, the Maryland Federation of Art, Nexus Gallery and Viridian Artists Gallery (NYC), Historic Yellow Springs (PA) and Gallery Imperato (Baltimore). Her videos have been shown in Wilmington, Dover and San Antonio.
In April 2013 she will exhibit work from several of her pinhole series at The Delaplaine Visual Arts Education Center (Frederick, Maryland) and will have a show in Wilmington stemming from her artist residency at Winterthur Museum.
Her work has been published widely, both in print (including The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes, Light Leaks, and Shutterbug magazine) and online (including Square Magazine, Without Lenses, and The Pinhole Camera Blog). One of her toy camera images was selected from over 60,000 as a finalist in the Smithsonian Magazine 2012 photo contest. You can see work samples and learn more about her at www.nancybreslin.com.

The address is:
Pennsylvania Photographic Workshops
1307 Park Ave, Studio Six
Williamsport, PA 17701
570-971-2571
www.keepmeinthedark.com

Pathway between Gate of Five Nations and South Redoubt, Fort Niagara, Youngstown, NY, taken by Tod Ainslie using a hexagonal pinhole camera of his own design

Writer / Nancy Breslin

Nancy Breslin chases down some pinhole photography in Canada and finds some related to the War of 1812.

Afterimage: Tod Ainslie’s Vision of the War of 1812, which runs through February 24, 2013, features about twenty pinhole photographs taken at historic sites related to that war between the British and Americans, some of which was fought near Toronto. Ainslie designed three cameras for this work, one being hexagonal and multi-pinholed for 360 degree panoramas. Exhibit materials noted that, while 1812 was before the birth of photography, Ainsle chose pinhole cameras to “evoke the experiences of those who lived through the war.” The choice of black and white is probably closer to evoking our contemporary imagination than the actual experience of people in the early 19th century (who weren’t, after all, colorblind): the work did remind me of Civil War tintypes with their warm tones and flawed edges. One advantage of pinhole would be the long exposure, since I presume that otherwise it would be difficult at some of these locations to get so many desolate shots, free of passing strollers and other contemporary distractions. Ainslie’s approach gives the sites a lonely and timeless beauty.

If you have a pinhole camera, or have been itching to use one, this is a great excuse to take part in pinhole day 2012.

WPPD has made me aware of how early our spring is this year. I have often photographed my garden for the event, and it looks like the blossoms I have captured on the last Sunday in April in years past will be long gone this time around. I don’t know yet what will catch my eye a week from Sunday, but I’ll be out there with one or more of my pinhole cameras, looking for inspiration.

From pinhole to print – Inspiration, instructions and insights in less than an hour
by Gary Fabbri, Malin Fabbri and Peter Wiklund
The quick and easy way to learn how to build a pinhole camera!
From pinhole to print will guide you from drilling your first pinhole to printing your first pinhole photograph. It is an easy to read, step-by-step guide to making a pinhole camera and creating images.
Strongly recommended for beginners

Nancy Breslin visits Francesca Woodman’s exhibition and discovers diazotypes.

Diazotype by Francesca Woodman, from sfmoma.org

Most of Woodman’s work was in the form of relatively small black and white prints, although she did experiment with larger scale for several projects. The most striking of these were life-size “caryatid” diazotype prints, referred to in some of the wall text as “blueprints.” I wasn’t familiar with diazotypes. It is a direct positive, dry-development process. A full size positive is contact printed to paper treated with diazonium salt and a dye coupler. UV light breaks down the salt, and subsequent alkaline treatment (via ammonium hydroxide fumes) causes expression of the dye in unexposed areas, creating the image. It was one means of duplicating architectural drawings. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteprint)

Woodman’s diazotypes are beautiful. They are also apparently a bit of a conservation nightmare. The paper was thin and designed for transient use, as further UV exposure will degrade the image. The Metropolitan Museum of Art also currently has Woodman diazotypes on display, in the form of a huge work called “Temple Project,” collaged from almost 30 diazotype prints. Conservation of this piece is discussed at http://cool.conservation-us.org/coolaic/sg/bpg/annual/v21/bp21-05.pdf.

Woodman’s work was incredibly mature for an artist of her age. One can only imagine what would have emerged if she had lived to have a full career.

See gallery

North American photographers – East & East Coast
From: Delaware, USA.
Shows: Cyanotypes, Gum over cyanotype and Vandyke browns.

Nancy Breslin is teaching alternative photographic processes at the Uni. Here we can follow her five week course. Week five and the course is finished.

We’re done! Teaching a class over winter session isn’t as hectic as teaching two classes over winter session (which I have done), but it still goes by in a blur.

There were two assignments due this week: paper presentations on Tuesday and final projects on Thursday. For the former, the students could choose any alternative photo process that we weren’t doing in class and report on how it is done, including any safety concerns, and talk about a photographer who has used that process, while showing a sample of that person’s work. I’m always glad to be introduced to the work of new artists, and the students all learn from one another about some of the rich options beyond what they’ve already tried. I also hoped they would see how easy it is to find instructions online, so they’ll feel comfortable trying new techniques on their own in the future. We heard about bromoil, anthotypes and tintypes, among others.

Nancy Breslin's students look at final projects on the last day of the course.

But the highlight of the week was the final critique. The challenge was to create a set of prints, using any one or more processes from the semester, for which the subject matter was enhanced by an alternative approach. The original images came from digital, lensed and pinhole cameras, and the prints represented most of the techniques learned in the last month. Some of the students could have used more time, to maximize print quality or to expand a series, but everyone had engaging ideas and ended up with some novel work to add to a portfolio. Artist’s statements (a necessary evil for working artists) accompanied each project, and there were comments that some of these did genuinely enhance the appreciation of the work, which was after all the goal.

You can see a sample piece by each student at a group gallery on this website. Several of the class members plan to continue working with alternative processes, so hopefully we’ll be seeing more from them here or at other sites in the future. It has been a pleasure introducing these hand-made techniques to new artists, and I found myself getting a creative burst during the class as well.

If you’ve been reading along, thanks for joining us on our quick but fruitful journey.

Some prints from the students on the course can be found in the galleries.