Beer + Film

Have you ever wondered what happens when you take film and process it in beer? I had never thought about it until I stumbled across an article describing the process a little over a month ago. So what better way to find out what happens then to do it!

Photo Credit: Marianna Pojman

On March 15 Juliana Muniz, and myself ran a workshop with 5 other photographers to see the results for ourselves. Everyone shot a roll or two of Black & White 400 iso film including Kodak Tri-X, T-Max, and Ilford HP5.

Click here for the recipe.

Photo Credit: Marianna Pojman

We decided to process together as a group using cans of Guinness, the same 15 minute developing time and 85 degrees fahrenheit chemistry for all our rolls of film. We had pretty decent results, everyone had images! Everyones negatives were dense, but printable, with the Tri-X coming out the best.

Below is an example of a contact sheet from a roll of Tri-X and a print made from the boozy negative.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the workshop! Can’t wait to try this again with some different beers, or maybe a cider. If you would like to see more prints made from our Beer + Film experiment come check out a Darkroom Club meeting, the next one is April 27.

Photo Credit: Sean Butler
Photo Credit: Sean Butler

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PS: For anyone planning to try out this recipe, make sure the beer is 85 degrees fahrenheit before adding in the washing soda, or you’ll have solid clumps in your beer.

The Painted Photograph: Gallery and Artist Statement

Happy Monday everyone,

Jen Perena here with a quick post so that those of you who missed the opening, can’t get in to the gallery or are far away can see all the images in the exhibit.

There are a total of 24 matted and framed images divided into two series: the “Winter Series”, focusing mostly on snow and winter scenes, and the “Vegetation Series”, focusing mostly on veggies, cacti and other forms of vegetation.

I’ve marked the ones that have already sold, so just in case you want to buy from afar you know what is still available!

All prints are roughly 8x 10 (or 10×8, depending on orientation), and are matted and framed to size 16×20. Frames are the standard matte-black, metal Nielsen frames, with glass.

Right now you can only see the thumbs (clicking on an image will not make it bigger), but I am hoping to create an online gallery where you can see the work in more detail – stay tuned for a future blog post about that!

winter series for blog

Everything in the Winter Series (above) is selenium toned, and all prints are $250 framed, and $200 matted only.

Everything in the Vegetation Series (below) is selenium toned and then hand-water colored over the top. All prints are $300 framed and $250 matted only.

veg series for blog-updated

If you are interested in making a purchase, contact Megan Charland in the Photo Department office at 585-271-5920.

Here also is my Artist Statement, where you can learn more about my residency, my motivations and the work:

I grew up looking at, taking and appreciating photographs. My maternal grandfather was an ‘early adopter’ of photographic technology and took a camera with him around the world during his time in the Navy in the 1940s, filling numerous scrapbooks with ‘slice of life’ photos from on board his ships, and from his interactions with local people in the various countries where he was posted. I remember constantly looking through his large, leather-bound photo albums as a young child, fascinated by the very small, contrasty black and white prints with white borders and wavy edges.

I’ve been drawn to black and white as my preferred medium since that time, but after numerous classes and darkroom sessions, was not satisfied with the end results or the process. I was shooting film, making work and exhibiting it annually in shows at the Community Darkroom galleries, but after the shows would end the photos would go in a box never to be seen again.

About 15 years ago this changed when I took a Holga Camera class taught by Patrick Cain. I immediately loved the plastic camera with its quirks and light leaks, and the idea that each roll of film would be a crap shoot of whether anything would turn out. This was a bit more interesting to me because of the random chance that no matter what you did, a light leak or internal issue could impact the film. Then when you finally saw the film, you had to work harder to make something from the negatives.

Fast forward a few more years, and I began taking alternative and historic photo process classes, also at the Darkroom. Over a period of approximately 5 years, I tried everything offered: tin types, albumin prints, ambrotypes, cyanotypes, salt prints, wet-plate collodion, etc. Altogether, the classes were like a succession of ‘eureka moments’ for me – introducing numerous steps into the process of making a print, each one with a potentially different outcome, even though you essentially did the same thing. The quality of the original negative (composition aside) stopped really mattering when you were battling your own diligence preparing paper, tin or glass plates, as well as humidity and the age of the chemistry. And for me, this process became sort of addicting.

I finally settled on the process I like best: contact printing – when I took a platinum and palladium printing class. Using my Holga negatives, I made dozens of small, contrasty black and white prints – reminiscent of the ones I had loved in my grandfather’s albums – except the wavy white borders of his paper prints were replaced by the thick black borders made by brushstrokes as I painted chemistry onto different papers to make my work. Each finished print was precious, but the cost of the chemistry was high, and I didn’t feel confident to make work outside of a class.

Then I took a kallitype class with Jon Merritt and the final puzzle piece fell into place for me. Kallitypes are very similar to palladium prints, but with slightly different and more affordable chemistry, allowing for larger-size prints. After taking the class a couple times, I realized this was finally a process I could master and practice solo. Since then (roughly the last 3 years), I have been primarily focusing on making kallitypes.

The kallitype process I learned combines digital work with alternative process. I start with iPhone images which are then manipulated in Photoshop to create interesting black and whites with a specific curve for the kallitype process. The resulting digital negative is printed onto Pictorico plastic and then used for contact printing. The chemistry (silver nitrate and ferric oxalate) is hand mixed and manually applied to watercolor paper, then the paper is force dried using a hair dryer. I place the plastic negative on top of the dried photo-sensitive watercolor paper and expose it in a light box, and then the prints are developed, washed, toned and fixed in numerous baths. Each print is a labor of love and no two are alike. And I love that.

For this exhibit, I explored two themes. The first is about snow and winter. The 12 prints are all selenium-toned kallitypes, featuring snow in unexpected forms, to make the viewer look twice. While some of the compositions are more accessible and traditional in terms of the viewer’s ability to understand exactly what they are looking at (i.e. a pine branch covered in snow), others focus more on the angle, texture, light and frame, so the viewer may have to use some imagination. Or at least view all the images in total in order to better understand the few that are more abstract.

The second theme is about hand coloring. For these the subject matter varies from vegetables and flowers to cacti and other forms of vegetation. This set of 12 also started as toned, black and white kallitypes, but I then watercolored them. Some are more subtle, some more vivid. This part of the project was motivated by my love of real-life color, and by the endless tones, textures, shapes, depths, etc. of organic matter.

The entire body of work wraps up a 6-month residency here at the Photography Department, and is dedicated to the memory of my late father, also a photographer, who taught me to cook and to ski, and who instilled in me my love of vegetables and appreciation for winter and snow.

 

 

Prepping for The Painted Photograph Exhibit

Hi everyone! Jen Perena here, using this weird limbo time in between Christmas and New Years while the Photo Dept is closed to prep for my upcoming exhibit.

I spent some time the week before Christmas scanning all of my kallitypes. I still have some editing to do, but the goal is to prepare digital files (essentially coming full circle, as all the images started as digital photos on my iPhone!) which I can use to make a book or a zine.

Scanning
Scanning my kallitypes

I’m not that great with Photoshop, but Megan showed me how to crop and edit my files for a book versus what to do for a zine. My goal with this task is to prepare something that will be available while my exhibit is running, though I am not sure I’ll be able to finish in time for the opening.

Editing scans
Editing scans of my kallitypes in Photoshop

Then just after Christmas I started matting and framing. This is the most labor-intensive part of the exhibit prep: cleaning all the glass, measuring all the prints, cutting all the mats, assembling the ‘sandwiches’, and putting the frames together. Without messing it up!

cleaning glass
Washing the glass: my least favorite part about matting and framing, though it can be a good workout!

I know a lot of people would hire someone else to do this part, but it’s not the way I was ‘raised’ by Pearl and Glossy. Though tedious, it makes the difference in how the entire show looks once it’s up on the wall.

For this exhibit, all of the images, which are pretty close to 8×10 size, will be matted and framed to size 16×20. I was hoping to have a total of 20 images, but looks like I will have a few more. I was fortunate to be able to borrow some framing supplies so I didn’t have to purchase all new frames and glass….and that was actually a huge $$ savings.

matting supplies
Matting supplies: two-ply and four-ply mat board, and flat black Nielsen metal frames, in 16 and 20 inch pieces

These photos are from last week when I framed the first six prints. That session lasted about 4 hours….which was an hour longer than expected (I usually do one frame in about 30 min), in part because I sliced my finger while cleaning a piece of glass (Pat Cain would be so mad at me!) and had to get bandaged (and clean up the blood) before proceeding…. and in part because it’s been over a year, and it takes a bit to get back into a flow of remembering how the mat cutters work and how to put frames together.

measuring mats
Marking the mat boards in preparation for cutting

The mat cutters can be tricky buggers. You need a sharp blade, adjusted to the correct depth, pieces of foam core lined up to the side so the large mat board lays flat and doesn’t bend, and a ‘clean’ piece of board underneath where you are cutting. And putty – don’t forget the putty! Otherwise the cutter slides around all over the table.

cutting mats
Using the Alto mat board cutters to hand cut all my mats

I managed OK for the first few, but then started to see burrs on the beveled edge – indicating either blade depth was off, or the blade was getting blunted, or the paper underneath was too chewed up, allowing paper fibers to pull up into the bevel cut – or it could have also been all three; In the end the clean line I was seeking was not happening, and I had to sacrifice several pieces of my beautiful white four-ply mat while I continued to troubleshoot.

inspecting the beveled edge
Inspecting the beveled edge and smoothing out the little rough bits

Thankfully friends were able to help me with some tips and techniques, showing me some things I had forgotten (like using an emery board to file small burrs off the beveled edge), and by the time I am writing this post, 17 of the prints are matted and framed to my satisfaction. This is good AND bad news, since I still have 7 more to go and we were planning to start hanging the show on Wed, Jan 2…..

Anyway, I hope to finish the matting and framing in time….then we need to fine tune labels, finalize my show statement, and plan out refreshments for the opening – Saturday, January 12 from 2 to 5 pm. I hope you can all make it!

In the meantime, head over to Instagram and check out the @i.heart.roc feed – I’m taking it over starting tomorrow (New Years Day!) through January 4th, and I’ll be sharing some of my favorite places and things in Rochester.

Best wishes to you all for a Very Happy New Year!

Community and Collaboration Part 2

Since I wrote my last post, and with my lecture series coming up in 2019, I’ve been thinking more and more about Community in the context of a healthy art practice.

 

For me, it can be really easy to isolate artistically. I struggle with some common self-sabotaging creative blocks like:

 

“Someone else has already done this, what’s the point of my doing it?”

“Someone will steal my ideas or get credit for my labor/ideas.”

“My ideas aren’t really important, good, relevant, etc…”

 

These, among a litany of other personal and collective messages about creativity and artists, can really get in the way of a successful creative life. Community, but especially the COLLABORATION that emerges from Creative Community, is a way to break down barriers to art making.

 

Over the next three posts, I will be sharing encounters I have had over the last couple of weeks that emphasize the importance of community and collaboration as an artist. This week, we’ll start with Louis.

 

Louis Chavez

 

Photo of Louis Chavez by Megan May, iphone

I met Louis through a friend of a friend. Louis Chavez is a Southern California transplant like me. They like to say, “We’re both California Girls.”

 

We both escaped our dessert hometowns to find healing and queer community in the cool moist air of the Northwest Coast. We’re ‘85 babies. We both love film photography. And, for now, we both reside in Rochester NY. Obviously, a collaborative duo destined in the stars.

 

Louis has encountered a lot of generosity as they have developed their photography practice. Friends, fellow photographers, willing to lend film, cameras and other resources in order that learning and creative development were possible.

Photo of Megan May by Louis Chavez, Film, Kodak Portra

 

Louis has taken this kindness and paid it forward with me. They’ve been willing to lend me film as well as their time and knowledge so I could understand my love of large format film photography better.

 

We’ve been meeting weekly for the past couple of months now. I feel very comfortable with Louis and during our last session, I started to get into an element of my performance practice that I usually only express when alone. I love the images he captured of my weird expression experiment.

Photo of Performance by Megan May photograph by Louis Chavez, Film, 120mm

 

My first two packs of 4” x  5” Kodak Film came in the mail this week (Ektar and Portra if you were wondering).

 

I’ll be moving much of my photographic practice into large format and I couldn’t be more excited. This wouldn’t be possible were it not for the collaboration and generosity with my friend Louis.

 

My ideas and my expression are important to Louis. He finds me inspiring and says so. His knowledge, patience, and support helps me feel confident and inspired too. When we work together we talk, laugh and create art. This collaborative relationship provides me with an experience to push back against of my limiting beliefs about my work and its importance. It is a very valuable bond.

I’ll be teaching a Lecture Series in the winter titled, “The Art of Being an Artist.” Lectures will take place on the third Thursday of the month January-March. In January my lecture will focus on the role of community and collaboration in my life as an artist. Look out for a full schedule of my lectures and classes and FCAC in the winter schedule!

follow Louis Chavez @llouischavezz & chavezlouis.com

Kallitype Chemistry is like shifting sand beneath your feet

Ciao! Jen Perena here, just back from visiting family in the Abruzzo region of eastern Italy. On the run up to the trip I was busy juggling my full-time work and prepping at home, so didn’t manage to get into the darkroom; then I was gone for about 10 days, so there was a little gap in my posts. I have been home now for just under a week, but am not 100%….I managed to develop a double sinus infection and ear infection during my travels….so instead of getting right back into the darkroom, I’ve begun watercoloring some of the vegetable prints I made in September. Photos of my work-in-progress coming in the next post!

In the mean time I wanted to share some pics from my trip (inspiration for more kallitpyes) and also some things I have been pondering over the last weeks.

Drift wood, stack of stones and traboccho, (fisherman’s stand) at Punta Aderci, along the Adriatic ‘Trabocchi Coast’

The title of this post hints at a constant challenge I face each time I make new kallitypes.

Let’s say in a perfect world I mix up a batch of fresh developer, fresh toner and fresh fixer for each session. When the first print goes into the developer, the developer immediately begins to weaken, as it leaches some of the emulsion, turning slightly yellow. After developing and washing, the print goes into the toner, and when the selenium reacts with the silver, it also starts to weaken and begins to darken. Then the print is washed again and fixed, and though the fixer doesn’t change color, you know it is becoming weaker, because it is getting absorbed into each sheet of paper. On top of that, the darkroom vent fan is causing all of the chemicals to slowly evaporate as it suctions up fumes.

Magnolia pod, Cividale, Italy

So basically, after the very first print hits all three baths, each of them is in turn slightly weakened, slightly older, slightly aged….each time you pass a new print through the same baths, you are already at a kind of disadvantage because the chemistry is not the same as when print #1 passed through.

Church door, Punta Penna, Vasto, Italy

By the end of a 3- or 4-hour long session, the developer is usually exhausted, and though the selenium continues to be usable, it takes longer and longer to get the tone shift you see when the solution is fresh. I usually save the selenium into a plastic bottle, and some of the particulate settles to the bottom, yielding a lighter-colored selenium for the next session, but it is still aged.

Shadow of seagull on the awning above the breakfast terrace of our hotel, Venice, Italy

Next session, I mix up fresh developer again, and then I reuse the same selenium and fixer. And the next session after that, same deal, until the selenium is visibly exhausted and no longer produces the color shift I want. So next session, fresh developer again and fresh selenium, but I continue to use the same fixer for at least another batch of prints.

50th Anniversary of the Annual Barcolana Regatta, largest in the world with over 2,600 boats of all classes, Bay of Trieste, Italy

Typically: my one batch of ammonium citrate developer yields 7 prints and by the time I discard it, it is pretty dark yellow; my one batch of selenium solution yields 14 or so prints and by the time I discard it, it is pretty dark black; my one batch of fixer yields roughly 25 prints, and though it is still clear when I finish, there is much less chemistry in the tray than when I started.

Door, Casalbordino, Italy

Moral of the story: not only is each print unique because of the way I coat the paper, the amount of chemistry I use to coat, the paper I select, the exposure I use, and the age and strength of the bulbs in the UV unit, but the chemistry in each bath is always different – developer stronger or weaker, selenium fresher or closer to being exhausted, etc. In order to get a more consistent result I would have to mix fresh everything for each print, which isn’t feasible, not to mention economical or practical.

And so there you have it. A dilemma which results in a feeling of constantly chasing what I have termed the ‘perfect imperfection’. There is no chance that two prints will be exactly the same. And that is perhaps what I most love about this process, even as it is endlessly frustrating knowing you just cannot control all the variables.  Fino alla prossima volta! (Until next time….)

 

 

What Does Femininity Mean to You? Part 2

Something incredible is happening for me.

 

As I continue to explore and research feminine expression through a larger cultural context, the idea of femininity is starting to break free of gender.

 

Femininity does not belong to any of us, but it belongs to all of us. It is there as an opportunity to be expressed, enjoyed and embodied.

 

She is the primordial energy of creation and is for each of us

 

I was listening to a panel discussion held by my teacher and friend, Guru Jagat with Shaman Durek and actress Kelly Rutherford. At one point Shaman Durek calls for “The Liberation of the Feminine,” and that struck a truth cord for me.

 

You can watch the discussion titled, “Alchemy of the Empowered Woman,” here.

 

The cross-cultural and expansive reclamation of powerful feminine expression is driving our cultural shift right now. There is no doubt in me about that.

 

For me, it will continue to be a playful and critical analysis and expression of my own feminine alter egos and how my identity as a cis-gender woman has been informed by positive, toxic and co-opted expressions of feminine virtue.

She is an infinity expressed by each of us @meganjoymay

What Does Femininity Mean to You? Part 1

 

If you had a chance to join us on Instagram Live last week, you might have gotten the opportunity to hear me ask the question: What does femininity mean to you?

 

As I have been discussing the context of my work with others and getting reactions and responses, I am finding something happening with my own definition of femininity: it is softening.

 

I am softening to the process of what this work actually means to me and how it is likely going to change me over the next year.

 

A really big part of me doesn’t want to label anything as inherently feminine. That’s so binary!

 

Like, make-up is feminine, flowers are feminine (their predominantly hermaphroditic and a huge part of their reproduction process includes pollinators and seed spreading critters), pink is feminine or worse, feminine is emotional, irrational and weak.

 

These are the ways in which the Patriarchal Perspective has screwed my understanding, expression, and judgment of what it means to be feminine and express femininity.

 

I’m going to have to overcome some of my own unconscious biases and rejections of femininity within my own life and personhood. To be frank, that’s sort of scary and liberating at the same time.

 

I’ll finish off with this, which I was able to articulate while talking with Jason Wilder during his artist talk. Ultimately, we live in a dualistic paradigm with non-dualistic tendencies.

It’s a paradox.

I love a good paradox.

It is my measure to hold capacity for the both/and. ‘Both/and” means it is ‘this’ and is it ‘that’ simultaneously. In this case, concerning femininity, it is both definitive and continuously in a state of flux.

 

This gives me some room to play.

 

Exploring my Feminine side with the help of Instagram Filters