I just wanted to take a moment to share some of the wonderful things that have happened in early March.
The first big event was the opening reception for my show, The Beauty of Flowers, in the Horticulture Center at Green Spring Gardens in Alexandria, Virginia. Thank you everyone who came to the opening. It was wonderful to see you and have a chance to share my photography with you.
Here are a few photos from the opening reception. Thank you to Jeanine Cummings and Bill Lawrence for taking some photos at the reception.
A few days after the reception, Bill and I headed to Rochester, New York to take a Digital Negative Making workshop at the George Eastman Museum. We had an extra day in Rochester to do some exploring – so of course, I photographed the local cemetery, Mount Hope Cemetery. Here’s one of the graveyard angels I saw that morning.
Graveyard Angel, Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester NY © 2019 Patty Hankins
That afternoon, we had a chance to meet Jen Perena at Flower City Arts Center in Rochester. I connected with Jen on Instagram after I saw the kallitypes she created as part of her artist residency at the Flower City Arts Center. I’ve been printing my cemetery photographs as kallitypes so I was eager to meet up with someone else using the same late 19th-century photographic printing process. Unlike most kallitypes that are monochromatic images, Jen applies watercolor paints to her kallitypes to create color images. You can learn more about Jen’s work on her website at https://kallitypegirl.com/
Here’s a photo I took of Jen with her unique color kallitypes.
Finally on Wednesday, the workshop began! I’ll admit to be a little nervous about taking the workshop – after all, I’m fine with photoshop so I wasn’t worried about creating the negatives – but it’s been over 25 years since I spent much time in a darkroom – and here I was going to probably the best place in the country to learn historic printing processes!
It turns out, I had nothing to worry about. Our two instructors, Nick Brandreth and Mark Osterman, were fabulous. The first two days of the workshop were the technical part. We learned how to calibrate our process so we could produce dense enough negatives for printing and how to print the negatives using the Salt Printing process first developed by Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830’s.
These are photos of one of my calibration tools in the first wash and of my final digital negatives.
On Friday, we spent the day printing! Not only did we print our photos, we toned them with gold, and then waxed them with beeswax and lavender oil to ensure their longevity.
Here’s my salt print of Kitty Dusty as Frida Kahlo and a quick photo of my two prints with my official George Eastman Museum Workshop darkroom apron!
I had a fabulous time at the workshop. Not only did I learn how to create better digital negatives and how to make salt prints – I got to spend 3 days at the George Eastman Museum! During slow times in the class, the instructors would pull out photographs printed with all sorts of historic processes, or various camera models, including hand-made cameras made from cardboard! We never knew who was going to stop by the workshop to say hello and chat, one of the people who dropped in had been instrumental in developing the emulsion for my favorite Black & White film. And then there was all the wonderful Kodak and photographic history on display. If the door on one of the rooms between our classroom and the ladies room was open – I could see some original Kodak Girl advertising posters from the early 1900’s!
Between the opening reception, meeting Jen and seeing her work, and the workshop – it was an incredible week. And now that I’m home, the weather is finally warming up and I can start photographing flowers outdoors again.