The following is a walk through one print to talk about the steps from initial shoot to finished image.
This series of asylum windows was taken at the North Princeton Developmental Center in New Jersey. The site has been condemned as structurally unsafe but one can still wander the grounds and view the buildings from the outside. There is a large greenhouse on the property and I was really drawn to the patterns the broken panes created. I realized as I spent more and more time shooting there, that I liked the way the broken glass allowed me glimpses of the world outside while I was inside with the remnants of the original plantings inside. I tend to shoot intuitively so I wasn’t really certain which images I would use once I got back into the darkroom. I knew that I liked what I was seeing so I shot an “A’ roll and “B” roll as I went along.
I cross-processed the “A” film rolls and really started working with them in the wet darkroom. I’ve shot this way for years and have found that after some practice with the process as a whole, one can get a sense of how to expose for the processing. It’s often frustrating in the beginning, but with practice you can start to visualize what the negatives will look like.
After I played with the prints in the darkroom I scanned the negs. Here’s one such original scan.
Then I started playing in Photoshop to see what the file looked like with the typical corrections I’d apply in the traditional darkroom.
After some toying around I got this and thought it had some interesting aspects. But too dull for my taste. Not enough difference between the foreground and background. It didn’t get across the ideas of both spaces as I’d noticed when I was shooting. What I wanted was something that communicated that feeling of standing in a space which was not clearly interior and not clearly exterior. (The presence of the weedy plant leaves open some question as to which kind of space this is).
After more and more playing with the files I started using the inherent capabilities of the digital files to pull them apart and re-combine the pieces. I started playing also with the idea of editions. More like a printmaker creates “Editions Variable” in a suite of work. Each one plays off the one before while remaining within the basic ideas of the series.
So what came next were some of the following variations on the theme.
What I like about the freedom of working in editions variable is that it gives me the space to explore threads and themes which I see in the initial images. I can spend time drawing each thread out along the lines of successive images. Elaborating and expanding my understanding of the subject as I go along. When seen together in a group, the variations illuminate the main threads that I have followed and allow the viewer access to both my process and varying aspects of the subject. -AK