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I haven’t had the urge to make lumen prints for a long time, but I have found my groove again. Lumen prints are just so fun and surprising and beautiful— they’re addictive to make! One thing I have been doing this time around is scanning the unfixed prints before fixing, to capture the fugitive colors. I scrounged plants and weeds around my house.
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Last year I played around with the VanDyke Brown process a little, and I've gone back to it. VanDyke Brown process is similar to the cyanotype process, but needs a bath in fixer. I'm trying to fuck with the process like I do with the cyanotype process, but it's not as easy. I'm having some success, but I cannot get any different colors, and I don't think I will be able to. I wish I knew more about chemistry!
Printing these remind me of when I was in college. Every day one summer I went to the printshop and printed. I printed a lot of meh prints, but at the end of it I'd gotten the inspiration for and started on a whole series of work based upon the structure of butterfly and insect wings and rust. This is similar because I find I make SO many prints that just don't make the cut to be scanned to make into prints for sale. I have to make many prints to get a few that do, because that's just how it works, and I kind of love just how much it makes me work.
I've got some expired photo paper (some from the former Soviet Union!!) coming to me to experiment with lumen printing. I feel a little limited in what I can do without a darkroom-- or even a room I can really use as a darkroom--so I'm doing what alternative processes I can without it. Salt printing, Kallitypes, Ziatypes, Gum Bichromate, and Carbon printing are all processes that I want to investigate further into.
