New Adventures in Printmaking

One of the more interesting sides of studying here at UNM has been learning about Printmaking. One of my classes here is called "Introduction to Printmaking", and is about as broad an introduction as one could hope for, covering Relief (lino), Intaglio, Collagraph, Litho and Monoprint.

At first, I was kinda worried - mostly because I'd never really had to create work directly with my hands. Anything I'd made at GSA had been primarily photographic, and the photographic way of working is something that I am very comfortable and confident with. Even though I knew I could draw to a fairly basic standard, I was a lot less confident with how my fairly rudimentary skills would stand up in a university-level environment.

Aside from the matter of technical skill, the other big challenge was taking a very different approach to the creative side of generating ideas for work. As a photographer, my approach generally involves thinking of some sort of reasonable subject matter that might suit my needs and how to go about photographing it. I am more or less restricted to depicting objects that exist in some physical form in the real world. With drawing, the possibilities are far less limited, and this has been difficult for me to deal with. All of a sudden, the range of potential subject matter is extended from what I can depict, to what I should depict.

The only minor restrictions placed on my subject matter were those placed by the project briefs, and of course, trying to pick something that would work well specific to the particular print method being taught at the time.

I was relatively content with how my course had been progressing, and how I'd managed to cope with these new challenges. To an extent, I'd played it relatively safe with my prints, still sticking with what could probably be described as a very photographic way of seeing. Given my low initial confidence, just "coping" with the course and not making anything too terrible had satisfied me to a pretty decent degree, and I really wasn't too worried about the grades. I was most surprised when after the mid-term portfolio submission, that for the four projects handed in, I'd got three A's and a B+.

As any art student will tell you, grades are always a bit of a weird thing to get for something where there really are no absolute right or wrong answers as there might be in a maths exam. It was strange getting A's for what I would've only called a competent performance, especially coming from GSA, where A grades seem much harder to come by.

All this leads me to my current situation, beginning in the early stages of learning about lithography. I'd recently read a post on Jim Hamlyn's blog (one of my tutors at GSA) about taking risks in order to improve performance. In Jim's post, he mentions a tennis-playing friend - she would always win the games, but believed that her playing partner was the better player, because he would attempt more bold and risky playing techniques. In effect, I've been feeling a lot like the consistent player - getting the good grades, but without necessarily pushing myself as hard as I should.

So what should happen? Well, today I'd decided on the subject matter for my litho print, had made some preliminary sketches in my sketchbook, and was all ready to make what I thought would be a great print. I'd decided to break away from my standard photographic way of seeing, and tried something a bit different. Of course, when I got my drawing done on the aluminium plate, it was clear to me (and most of the people who saw it) that it was pretty much a load of crap.

Luckily, I'd managed to realise that my image was rubbish before committing to processing the plate and making any prints. I now have a couple of choices as far as I see it - 1) Just carry on and print the crap image anyway 2a) Clear the plate and go back to something more familiar and comfortable or 2b) Clear the plate and try something else risky. Option 1 would take the least effort - I wouldn't have to spend much time, but I know I'd be dissatisfied personally, and I'd likely get a poor grade too. Option 2a would require a bit of effort (cleaning the plate is a bit of a tricky process), and although I wouldn't have to push myself creatively, I know I'd be able to pull off a good grade at the end of it. Option 2b is the hardest option - not only do I have to go through the long-winded technical process of cleaning the plate and re-drawing an image, I also have to take a big risk creatively. Should I make a mess of my second drawing, I won't have time to clean the plate and start again - I'll be left in the situation like option 1 where I have a work that I'm dissatisfied with and will likely get a poor grade for, but also having expended a whole lot more time and effort in the process of failing.

Of course, should option 2b work out, I'll be in the ideal situation, having created a good work that I'll be happy with, and got me a decent grade to go with it. The question now is whether or not I have the confidence to go ahead with this gamble. Certainly, form is not on my side at the moment, but then maybe making another failed work isn't such a bad thing, so long as I manage to fail in a new way and learn something from it!

Annual Blog Post

Well, it's been a year and 15 days (probably 16 by the time I finish writing) since my last blog post. It's not like anybody ever reads it anyway I don't think - most of the feedback seems to be from spambots posting nice comments about where I can source some cut-price viagra.

So, to catch up, this time last year I would've been in the early stages of second year. Second year was a bit crap for various reasons, and I finished up feeling a bit dissatisfied with where I'd ended up, artistically at least. By the end of it, I was really glad to be getting out of GSA for a while, since I'd be going on exchange to the University of New Mexico in the US. I did my usual summer stint at the bike shop, and by mid-August, I found myself in Albuquerque.

Albuquerque is quite a lot warmer than Scotland, though you probably didn't need me to tell you that, right? I got some mental sunburn, especially cycling around trying to find flats spread all across a very expansive city. Eventually, after dodging a few real dumps, I found myself (concidentally) in exactly the same flat that Theresa and Chris from Glasgow had stayed in the year before. The nearest Ikea is all the way up in Denver, so Walmart had to provide the furniture.

The only thing that was kinda worrying me was my class schedule. I'd been advised to take 200-level courses, roughly equivalent to second year at uni. The problem was that there were only two 200-level photography courses, and I hadn't been able to get on early and register for them due to a computer system error, so they were full by the time I got there. Luckily, I managed to beg a spare place on one of them, so I ended up with a timetable consisting of Digital Imaging Techniques, Intro to Printmaking, Modern Art History and History of Photography.

While there are many things I find confusing, bewildering or just plain annoying about the way the American educational system works, perhaps the biggest and most noticeable difference has been that of the workload compared to that of GSA. I find myself with a very frustrating mix - there's a lot more work to do, in terms of volume, but very little of it is particularly challenging.

Admittedly, my printmaking class is pretty challenging, but I put this down to the fact that I've never really had to create decent artworks without the aid of a camera before, and having to rely purely on my clumsy hands leaves me somewhat limited.

My big worry is that I'm going to be somewhat left behind as a photographer when I return to Glasgow. I've been hearing all about the really interesting stuff that people back home have been up to, and all I've been doing is photoshopping daft pictures of penguins looking at abandoned shopping trolleys (I scored a perfect 100% for that assignment by the way).

What I have been doing is trying to keep my own little personal side project on the go, shooting a LOT of Polaroid snapshots as I go along. I guess there's no deeper meaning to these, but they are really good fun (when my camera isn't deciding to spontaneously destroy itself) and definitely go a long way towards trying to keep me at least reasonably sane.

Digital?

This term at uni, our project involves looking at colour, and learning the various complexities of colour analogue photography, so as such, I've been shooting lots and lots of colour film with my Hasselblad.

Traditionally, when using colour film, I've always had to get it processed at a local lab (Snappy Snaps in Glasgow usually), and never printed anything - just scanned the images into my computer and used that as a basis on which to decide if I thought they were worthy of display or not.

However, I'm now able to process my own film at the Art School, and even better - make colour darkroom prints. This has opened my eyes in a massive way to the real potential of film, and the special things it can do. It appears the biggest shortfall in my workflow at the moment is bringing material from the analogue world into the digital.

This is one of my biggest problem areas - how to show analogue work in an increasingly digital-centred world. There are many great "success stories" of people who exhibit their work to a very vast audience via flickr, and get a lot of attention for their work that they otherwise possibly wouldn't have been able to gain.

My problem is that I'm primarily an analogue photographer these days, and that without a means to digitise images well, I am very possibly losing out on a great deal of exposure for my work. What I think looks great on an anolgue print, very rarely seems to translate well into a digital file.

On one hand, there are the nuts-and-bolts problems. With the scanner I have, colours are inconsistent and usually all over the place. In the image above, even with a large amount of colour correction in Photoshop, the colours are nowhere near the colours shown in the prints I've made. Then there's sharpness and detail - most of this is lost due to the inability of my film holders to keep the negatives flat while being scanned.

Secondly, and I think the most problematic aspect, is that often images that work well in a print lose a lot of their qualities when translated to a 600x600px view on a website. Digital viewing, it seems to me, requires a totally different style of photograph - subtlety of tone has to make way for high-saturation colours, and small details have to be ignored in favour of bold compositions.

One of the big problems of being an analogue worker, is that displaying photographs to the world at large is an altogether more difficult affair, and has to take place in an altogether more formal environment. One would firstly have to find a willing gallery in which to display work - pretty difficult without a "name" or at least some appropriate credentials to show.

Then there's the far more rigid framework in which the images are shown. Where flickr allows me to upload pretty much anything I like in any order at any time, showing in a gallery generally requires a predetermined set of related images to be shown in a fixed location for a fixed amount of time. Galleries also severly restrict the geographical coverage of work too - if I was to show prints at an exhibition in Glasgow for example, there'd be no way for friends of mine in places like New Zealand or the USA to view images without a very expensive air fare.

In writing this, I came up with a strange idea - the idea of a constantly changing and evolving gallery, perhaps something like a physical manifestation of flickr. A place where photographers would have space to show a couple of images, in any format they liked, changing at any time. Of course, this wouldn't quite have the full freedom and accessiblity of the internet, there'd still have to be some degree of curatorial control, otherwise the whole thing would just descend into anarchy. I think my idea definitely has a few holes at the moment, but it's given me something kinda fun to have a think about...

Getting There

Now into my third week of term two, and things aren't quite where I'd like them to be... that's not to say it's all bad though. The good news is, I can now develop and print in colour, which makes me happy - it's something I've wanted to learn for a long time. Admittedly, most of the tricky parts are taken care of by machines, but I still enjoy making the prints in the darkroom.

I'm not too keen on the colour paper though - I'm using Fuji Crystal Archive, as it's apparently the most easy to get regular supplies of. It has that weird plastic feel much like cheap inkjet and resin-coated black and white papers, definitely not too keen. The much nicer feel of fibre-based paper is just one of the many things drawing me back to black and white.

I'm still no further with choosing an aim for this term's work. It seems that with everything I read, and every artist's work that I look at, I just seem to be adding layer upon layer of confusing directions that I'd like to take my work in. I guess all I really need to do now is sit down and try and consolidate these messy thoughts into some kind of coherent form that I can make a body of work based on.

Researching can be dangerous in some ways. I had an idea for some work based on the telephone network equipment that I used to work with on a daily basis. The equipment comes in many shapes, sizes, colours, and degrees of flashy LED illumination, and there's definitely some interesting stuff to be found in telephone exchanges, not to mention their great significance as great unrecognised hubs of social interaction. I'd pre-visualised some of the images I had in mind - what I had wanted to feature in the pictures, and how I wanted them to look. With this idea in mind, you can only imagine how it felt when I discovered Lewis Baltz had made a set of almost perfectly identical images in the early 1990s... Damn!

I have to wonder how things might've turned out had I not discovered this Baltz body of work. I wonder about whether I could've confidently forged ahead unknowing, and produced work I was genuinely happy with; whether I could've exhibited the work without anybody ever noticing, or whether I'd even get the chance to hear viewers making the snide "he's just ripping off Baltz" comments. Mysteries indeed. Either way, I'm not sure I can feel confident in going ahead and making that set of images knowing there's something so close to my intentions already out there.

As it stands, I've cobbled together a couple of things that I might look into. One that's standing forward in my mind is the idea of the Scottish colour palette. I'd been looking at Joel Meyerowitz's Cape Light series, along with the work of Stephen Shore (among others) and really getting this feel for a very American type of light. I'd noticed this in New Zealand too - that the light had a very different quality about it. Scottish light is something special though, never does light get so incredibly flat and featureless. It has an incredible ability to absolutely suck the life and colour out of any given scene.

At first, this was of great frustration for me as a photographer in my early days. I was a big fan of high-saturation film, especially Kodak 160VC, and it made for some really crappy looking pictures when the light was flat. Trying to push out tons of contrast on overcast days just led to some really disappointing images. I almost wouldn't bother leaving the house some days if the skies were cloudy. On a recent trip up through the north-west of Scotland, I started beginning to appreciate this flat light as something very fundamental to the Scottish way of life.

Being Scottish is something I quite often have problems with. On one hand, I do find a lot of the landscapes, places and people very inspiring; but on the other hand, there's nothing that pisses me off quite like stupid nationalism (Scottish or otherwise), and the last thing I would want to do would be to take postcard shots of beautiful mountains and for anyone to get this idea that I was a full-blown proud Scot, because I'm most certainly not that.

The Beginning of What's About to Happen

Today was the first day back at art school again after working all summer. Was good to see all the people I hadn't been able to see over the summer, although in truth it felt like we'd hardly been away any time at all.

The big thing this term is colour photography. I'm kinda excited about the prospect of learning about colour developing and printing, although not so sure how enthusiastic I am about working in colour. I seem to have developed a bit of an attachment to black and white, something about it just seems right to me. However, it's always pretty good to be able to push my personal boundaries, so I guess I'll just need to see how it all looks once I get the ball rolling.

My biggest worry was a potential shortage of ideas coming into the year - I had grand plans of using my summer in order to investigate and begin initial developments into ideas for photographic projects; although with the joys of working full time, this didn't really happen. Thankfully, a lecture from our year tutor gave us quite a few useful starting points to have a look at. It definitely makes generating ideas a lot easier when you've got some good people to rip off - lots of further digging into a few names needed I think. I'm certainly not reluctant to say that I thought quite a lot of the images were total crap as well, but such are the joys of being an opinionated bastard sometimes.

I guess my next task is more reading. I have Charlotte Cotton's The Photograph as Contemporary Art on loan, and Susan Sontag's On Photography waiting on my bookshelf. Think I'll need to give Chromophobia by David Batchelor another run over too - it made for quite interesting reading, but a wee refresher with more of a look specifically at where my project's aims are would be pretty handy I think.

Let's see what happens next.

A Short Poem

I love the sound,
of rain so heavy it sets off car alarms.

Fuck cycling to work tomorrow.

Cycling is Shit

Today, I decided cycling is shit.

I got about three hours sleep last night, had a non-productive and rubbish day at work, and snuck out the door a few minutes early. I sprinted along the road from work on my bike, in order to catch a train that didn't really go where I wanted to go, and meant extra work at the other end. Sweaty, with steamed up glasses, I hopped off the train and embarked on my journey from the wrong station back towards home.

My legs felt like they were made of wood, there was a mean headwind, and it was raining. Of course, this meant wearing a waterproof jacket, and coupled with the warm temperature, I felt like I was riding inside my own personal oven. My tyres were a bit flatter than they ought to have been, the chain was in serious need of a good degrease-and-relube, and my saddle was its usual unforgiving self.

I had to ride along a shitty potholed road, with fuckwit Daily Star reading Transit drivers trying to kill me at every given opportunity, as well as the joys of dodging the fat morons who like to walk on the cycle lane.

To sum it up, I hated my legs, I hated my bike, and I hated the route.

Which led me on to wondering why the hell I do this? My aim of course, is to work over the summer in order to pay off my debts from the last year at uni, and to hopefully allow me a degree of cushioning when it comes time to piss away all the money again next year. Most depressing however, is that three whole days of this would only add up to one 50 pack of Ilford 16x20" photographic paper, a lot of which I'd usually end up throwing straight in the bin because I'd forgotten to stop the enlarger down or the darkroom door had been left open.

Which in turn, led me on to wondering why the hell I'd decided to ditch my job and go to the Art School in the first place. Why I'd given up a stable, well-paying job where I got paid to go on fun wee trips to silly wee villages in the middle of nowhere, and could afford as many pints or rolls of film as I liked without having to worry too much.

In case you're wondering by the way, horrible cycle runs in the rain are the perfect time to be thinking about such things. It gives your mind lots of free time, and an amazing ability to focus purely on the negative.

And then I remembered. Working in my old safe job was alright, but actually it wasn't that safe at all - a lot of instability came to the job after I left, and I think I managed to jump ship at just the right time. And although I got to go on nice wee jaunts fairly often, the majority of the time was spent sitting at a desk facing death by spreadsheet. Of course, my main reason for wanting a well-paying job was so that I could afford things like Nikons and rolls of 160VC and be able to enjoy taking photographs. In fact, without that job, I never would've been able to get into photography at all, so I suppose I owe it one.

And then I remembered my year at Art School so far. The excellent (and not so excellent) people, the fun times had, and most importantly - the personal reward of having pushed myself into unknown territory and having come out the other side with a lot of good experiences.

Maybe if this cycle journey has taught me anything, it's not to make any more stupid expensive projects out of Ikea lamps and Polaroid film and give a little more love back to the digital camera!

As for the cycling thing, I often think about just buying a car, but I don't think I can be that person. I was happy to have my folks' old Corsa when I didn't have to pay for it, but the idea of spending hundreds of pounds on a car seems mad, when I could have so much more fun with it instead. Same with the guys I saw on expensive, lightweight road bikes with neon yellow jackets and lycra on - I'll quite happily take my rickety wee hack bike, old jeans and scabby old waterproof jacket and save the rest for having fun, whatever that may involve.

And anyway, all those horrible rides along crap roads just make those mountain biking days all that more special. I still don't think I can quite think of anything that compares to that feeling of nailing it down a dusty trail with sunshine and trees and the odd fly in the teeth for good measure.

Cycling is shit sometimes, but it's good for gaining a sense of perspective on things.

Polaroid DS-34 GelCam

This is the latest weird and wonderful addition to my camera collection - a Polaroid/Fotodyne DS-34 GelCam, apparently used to record Gel Electrophoresis.

It's a pretty interesting camera. It takes regular Polaroid/Fuji packfilm (FP-100, FP-3000 etc.). The rollers and stuff were pretty disgusting when I opened it up, but it was nothing a quick wash down couldn't sort out. It has a Tominon 105mm f/4.5 lens on the front with a Copal shutter. Shutter speeds range from 1/125 to 1sec and bulb, and apertures from f/4.5 to f/32. The shutter is actuated by a cable release - the pistol-grip handle on the bottom of the camera has its own cable release built in, but the handle can be removed for mounting the camera to a tripod, and the cable release replaced with a regular bog-standard model. There's also a PC flash terminal with x-sync, which works.

Because it's a rigid body with a large format style leaf shutter, it's basically a fixed macro camera. Focus distance is somewhere in the region of about 30cm. Because it was designed to be mounted to scientific equipment using a fixed lens hood type thing, there's no way of telling whether or not you're in focus. I work out the correct camera-to-subject distance by using a shoelace that I calibrated to the correct distance and marked with a pen.

There's no viewfinder either. You may notice the three bits of gaffer tape on the top - I stuck them on to roughly indicate the angle of view. Not ideal, but it'll do for now I suppose!

The best part of it all? It only cost me about £12 :-)

I'll write a more full and detailed post on the camera once I've got to know my way around it a bit better.

Fandan

You may have noticed it's been quite a while since I last posted a blog entry. This is very bad of me, and a bad habit I seem to get into from time to time - just plain forgetting to keep things up to date.

Since my last post in November, I've undertaken a pretty big step with my photography. I'm now studying towards a BA in Fine Art Photography at Glasgow School of Art, and it's great. I'm now about three quarters of the way through the first year of the course, and actually amazed how time has flown by, seems like no time at all since I first appeared there.

Before I arrived at the Art School, I wasn't really sure what the hell to expect. I'd not managed to go on any of the open days because I'd been in New Zealand, and my only experience of the school had been a few visits to the degree shows. My last experience of any formal art education had been in my standard grade art class at high school, back in 2001 or thereabouts, and even at that I wasn't very great.

Anyway, in spite of the nerves beforehand, I've been managing to cope pretty well so far I reckon. The stuff along the lines of theory and history were what I was most worried about, but thankfully the essays have been pretty short for that, and I don't mind presentations too much.

The general working environment has been quite interesting to get used to as well. Having come from a very task-based environment as an engineer, it's been a bit weird getting used to the more free-flowing way of working in a studio with a pretty open timetable. I have to say, I definitely enjoy the freedom, but it does sometimes make it pretty tricky trying to force yourself to get work done when things are quiet.

The people are good, and a lot easier to get on with than I had expected. Admittedly, there are very few (if any) people who share my taste for a spot of Slayer, but it's nice to be surrounded by lots of people with lots of interesting ideas and different viewpoints. I don't see myself putting on the skinny jeans and buying dubstep records just yet, but being one of those art school fandans isn't quite so bad after all...

Quick-N-Dirty Film Removal

Previously, whenever I've been developing my own 35mm film, I've always used a manual-rewind camera, and deliberately made sure not to wind all the film back into the cannister. This meant it was nice and easy to get the film from the cannister onto the dev tank spiral, as there was no faffing about trying to get the film out of the cannister. You just made sure there was always a wee bit hanging out.

Now though, I've been using my new and super-cheap Nikon F75, which has an automatic film rewind on it. This is great, because it saves you having to wind a daft wee crank for ages. However, it has the downside that it sucks the film all the way back into the cannister. I've read about various techniques for getting the film back out, but those involved special film extractor tools (I don't have one), or hacking the cannister to pieces (not so easy in a dark bag). I decided to try and find some more "quick-and-dirty" ways of getting the film out, and I stumbled across This Page via google.

The technique, which was brilliantly effective, involved using a strip of dymo tape, sticking it inside the cannister, and using the sticky side to pick up the film and pull it out. For those of you unaware, Dymo tape is the old-skool plastic tape used for embossing letters onto, used before the days of laser label printers and stuff (See example).

Here are the simple stages required:

1. Take a strip of dymo tape, approximately 10cm (4 inches) long.
2. Peel backing plastic off, exposing sticky adhesive.
3. Push piece of tape into the film cannister through the opening slot, with the sticky side facing in towards the central spindle.
4. Once the tape is in about 7cm (3 inches), you'll start to feel it jam. Pull the tape in a little further by winding the film spindle.
5. Firmly (but not too hard), pull on the tape that's left outside the cannister. This should pull the end of the roll out through the opening slot.

For those of you worried, the adhesive on the dymo tape shouldn't damage the film at all. For starters, the adhesive only touches on the backing film, not on the emulsion side, so the emulsion will not be damaged. The tape only touches on the first 10cm (4 inches) of the roll anyway, which will usually be exposed to sunlight when loading, so will be no use anyway.

Works a treat!