My passion for art was fostered at a young age by my parents, but it wasn’t until I bought a camera that I began scratching the surface of how art and design were related. I was fortunate to be able to build a darkroom at home in the attic where I could conduct all sorts of photographic experiments. At some point I’ll share those on this blog, but for now I want to share a collection of more traditional photographs that I made while traveling in France in 1994.

The prints fit in an over-sized handmade case containing 60 unique 16″ x 20″ photographic prints derived from 6 cm x 9 cm negative film. The are individually matted and are held in the right side of the open book (as in a portfolio case). On the left, there are over-sized collage pages made from my journals and material that I collected during my travels in France.

Here is a slide show that features many of the photographs in the case. The digital scans do not do justice to the orginals, but at least they are now online to share!

This project represented the impulse to do something in the traditional way (the “right way” according to some) before deconstructing the process. Thus, the results are traditional black and white photographs hand printed on fiber paper. For those who have a technical interest in photography, these were printed using a split filtering process, whereby the exposure of the paper during printing was split into three periods, each with a different contrast filter. The result is the grouping of shades of gray into three tonal ranges. This can be done remarkable easily today using a tool like Photoshop today, but was a rather advanced technique to master when I was in college.