This is an alternative form of photography known as Van Dyke Brown. A cousin to alternative processes Cyanotype and Gum Bichromate, Van Dyke Brown is accomplished by mixing the silver photographic emulsion by hand and applying it to a surface that you want to make a photograph on. It could be fabric or ceramic for example. This is on 120 lb hot press watercolor paper, applied with a brush in a darkroom.
“Margaret”, the image at the left, is the result of layering and multiple exposures, each processed to their final cure before reapplying emulsion and exposing again. It was done as an illustration, one of a series I created for haiku written by elementary school students for the Missouri Association of Teachers of English. The image consists of a chicken skeleton and an X-ray of a little girl in profile. The poem reads;
the rooster crows but / Margaret cannot hear it / both her ears are blind
. . . . .
In “Madonna” below, the camera shutter is taped open, and the space is completely dark except for what is lit by hand with a flashlight. The length of time that the light remains shining on an area will determine the brightness of what is recorded on the film. This technique is called in-camera composition as the image is being composed directly onto the film negative as a drawing, in light, rather than manipulated or composed in the darkroom onto print paper where there is more exacting control.
All of the composition occurs based on envisioning in the darkness.
The final contact print exposure took place in a vacuum frame under ultraviolet light onto watercolor paper. Full sunlight can also be used.
Madonna
All of the elements in the image are meant to convey femininity; a folded bed, a box, a baby doll, an egg, a mirror and mannequin. The image above the mirror is a shadow cast from lighting a mask representing the past, the figure represents the present, and the baby the future. The model doesn’t actually appear in the image, only her reflection, her light, in the mirror.
The chevron shape implies the symmetry of femaleness, and expands into the total image of the Madonna figure consisting of all the worldly parts put together, her mantle (shadow, mirror, figure, bed; arms up) embracing the past, present and future; the baby, the woman, all of us born of women. An implied navel, ovaries, and womb.
The emerging of light over darkness, the great dignity of being over nothingness.
Printed from the full size negative of the image and its mirrored reverse, the piece is matted and framed as a chevron shape, hand cut and shaped to fit the image.
