​Sunlight and silver

In September of 2018, Hurricane Florence sat above my small coastal town and dumped nearly 30 inches of rain on us.  Sadly, a good bit of that went into my darkroom and I wasn’t able to work there for close to eight months. For me, being in the darkroom is like therapy, so I had to find a substitute.  I started making cyanotype photograms in my backyard. As my mind wandered while I was working, I wondered if I could combine cyanotype photograms and silver gelatin photograms. I did a small test with some old silver gelatin photograms.  The results weren’t great, but they were good enough to convince me to pursue the process further. At that point though, it would still be close to five months before I could get into my darkroom again. I worked on some compositions in my head while I continued to do the straight cyanotypes in the yard.  Finally, in mid-April 2019, I had my first darkroom day since Hurricane Florence. I was able to start fully experimenting with cyanotype on silver gelatin. The cyanotype on silver gelatin is a three-step process that requires thoughtful planning and time spent both in the darkroom and in the yard. The images in this series are literally my first attempts with this process.  I’ve learned a lot in a short time, but I have more experimenting and creating to do.

The Sunlight and Silver series contains both cyanotype photograms and cyanotype on silver photograms, that were created during, and inspired by my time away from my darkroom.

The Sunlight and Silver series was selected as an Outstanding Body of Work in the 2019 Denis Roussel Award by juror Jesseca Ferguson. The interview with Rfotofolio can be found here.

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