A Special One-Off Afternoon Talk

Venice Experimental Video And Performing Art Festival

Salt Printing Masterclass at London Metropolitan University

This week I taught a Salt printing masterclass at The School of Art, Architecture & Design which forms part of London Metropolitan University.

Salt Printing is a contact printing process, which means that the final print will be the same size as your negative.

It was great to see the students immersed and having a great time making their own salt prints, all of which I’m happy to say turned out really well. It was a pleasure for me to see them working, enjoying and keeping this 183 year old process alive. Some of them even went back into the darkroom the following day to do more – happy days!

Personally, I think it’s fantastic that the head of the department at The School of Art, Architecture & Design push back the waves to make these masterclasses available to the BA photography students, giving them a larger creative tool-box, allowing them a wider visual language to express themselves.

It’s hard to imagine a time where there was no such thing as photography, especially today when everyone takes photographs.

Salted paper was the first photographic invention, for photography as we know it today.

Henry Fox Talbot’s discovery – making a negative in camera and using that negative to make multiple prints is the basis of all photography today. The Daguerrotype may historically mark the introduction of photography to the world but it only produced a single image.

Historically salt printing was thought to be dull and dead looking because it needed a contrasty negative for the long exposure scale – today with digital technology we can make digital negatives using curves in photoshop to suit salt printing and other alternative processes and creating prints with a beautiful longer tonal range.

Below:
Some of my own hand made Salt prints and behind the scene photographs of the Salt Printing Masterclass.

Many thanks to Kasia Kowalska for the behind the scene photos.

If you are interested in photography workshops, masterlasses, mentoring, or one to one photographic tuition, please email me at ian at ianphillipsmclaren.com

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Cyanotype Prints & Cyanotype Toning

This week I taught a masterclass on cyanotype printing at The School of Art, Architecture & Design which forms part of London Metropolitan University.

Cyanotype is the most popular of the alternative processes, possibly because it is seen to be easy and cheap – in the past it was mainly associated with amateur photography.

In the 1800’s serious photographers used cyanotype chemistry to proof print their negatives before making silver prints, Edward S. Curtis made some great cyanotype portraits. It is actually easy to make an image with cyanotype but to make a beautiful print with a long tonal range that can compete with silver prints or platinum prints, then it’s definitely more complex.

With the advances in digital technology we are now able to print complex digital negatives that can be manipulated in Photoshop and printed on to OHP transparency film and then used to make contact prints for any of the alternative printing processes – in the past, you would have to have carried around a heavy, bulky, large format  camera and tripod to make a negative the size of the images below.

The cyanotype’s here were printed in the typical blue cyan first, then the images were bleached and toned. A cyanotype can be toned in various things like, tea, coffee, wine tannin, tannic acid and various botanicals.

The first row of images below were shot using an analogue Rolleiflex f2.8 camera with Kodak Tri X 120 film, the negatives were then scanned, interpolated to a larger size and then printed onto OHP transparency film. This then allowed me to make a large contact print with cyanotype chemistry. The second row of images were shot on an iPhone to show that you don’t need expensive camera equipment in order to make a beautiful cyanotype print. The last of the images, the pear and the foggy landscape were shot on a Canon 5d digital camera.

Below are the samples that I made to show the students during the masterclass at The School of Art, Architecture & Design 

Ann-Johnson

Jason-Ford

Self-portraits with ancient Roman artefacts

Wire Pear

self-i project

I’ve been working on my ‘Self-i’ project for the last few of months. last September I embarked on an MA Fine art degree `( I know – oldest student in town ) to try to push my art and to give me the next two years of just experimenting with my ideas. If I’m being honest, I would have hated the self-i images only a year ago as they didn’t fit in with my purist / classical ( with an edge ) style of photography, I would have thought that they were too contrived but I’ve been pushing myself out of my comfort zone for this project and really trying to experiment, I’m actually enjoying it and looking forward to experimenting with other projects in the future. Because selfie’s are mainly the domain of social media and live online and this module is about curating a site specific exhibition, I thought it fitting that the exhibition should be a virtual exhibition in an online gallery and promoted via social media. One of the many good things that have come out of this project is that I have taught myself some new creative tools; building Virtual Reality worlds / spaces which I’m looking forward to using in future projects. To view the Virtual Gallery here’s the link https://ianphillipsmclaren.com/vg/ and to view the images from the project here’s that link https://ianphillipsmclaren.com/self-i/ see below for the project text.

My previous project Gwen – ‘Did I Want To Be Here ? examined dementia as a state of being and attempted to reflect that state using ideas about layering and identity.  This current work has led me deeper into themes related to memory, identity and specifically the construction of self in our visual culture.

The question, Who are you and how do you know? Sits central to my virtual gallery.

Framing personal identity in the context of the pursuit of perfection and an idea that there is a normal from which we fear to deviate, I want to explore the concept such as:

• Is ‘who I am only validated by approval from my peers and contemporaries?
• Do I need to distort and manipulate my image in order to gain approval?
• Does the individual start to lose their true identity by constantly presenting a curated self?

The selfie is a millennial social phenomenon.  Once the sole domain of teenagers, it has now permeated our culture on a grand scale  arguably distorting how we perceive ourselves and how we want to be perceived, as we turn the camera in on ourselves. Selfie’s may provide people with a sense of validation and connectedness when they see their friends pop up on their social media accounts.  And then there is the great rush, the boost of dopamine we receive when someone ‘likes’ our photo.

There
may be a darker side to this romance with our own constructed and
selected image, a Swansea University study (www.bbcwales.com, 2018)
states that selfies fuel narcissism, a sense of entitlement and the need
for admiration. The selfie has been described as a desperate form of
exhibitionism (Storr,W. 2017).  It seemed interesting therefore to put
these self-selected portraits in an exhibition that existed in a virtual
realm.  If they are our constructed selves, then may be putting them in
a space that is constructed is a way of turning up the gain.  Asking
the audience to reflect deeply as they leave (come out of the construct)
rather than during the experience on the reality of self.

In
essence selfies, it could be argued are a form of self-portrait and the
West has a rich history in this respect.  It starts with Albrecht Dürer
signing his famous self-portrait age 28 in the early 1500’s. 
Unwittingly, (or was it? We will never know) he started an enduring
cultural phenomenon that has found form in all artistic media across the
globe, that of depicting your face as the place that you reside (your
self).  In the creation of a selfie artist and subject are fused
(literally and metaphorically). We take a form that has traditions and
accepted boundaries and then create many copies of our self.  I wonder
if these copies are a way of saying I am here.  Here is my self.

When
Van Gogh and Kahlo painted self-portraits, it was to interpret their
emotional landscape.  Van Gogh even depicted his self as a chair.
However, more commonly now self-portraits captured on Digital Media
serves the purpose of capturing “our best life” – perfect, the ideal, no
matter how far removed that image may be from reality.

For
whatever reason, there seems to be an impulse for humans to make images
of themselves. There is a common connection between painted
self-portraits, photographic self-portraits and the humble selfie,
arguably they all refer to the ‘human condition’ of self, the “who are
you”.

By using the mechanism of self-portraits, I want to capture the subject’s exploration of themselves.  Their face and body language – capturing what is happening, their sense of self at that specific moment in time. How do they manifest the ‘ego’ part of identity, seen as the ‘ideal self’, the image that they want to be put out into the world?  The part that is putting on a show for other people.  Do they acknowledge they are putting on an act or do they actually believe their own act?

With the proliferation of Smart Phones with high definition cameras and the abundance and easy to use software, the norm today is to retouch and put photos through filters and textures to make us look different or better in our own eyes. My intention was to experiment with a variety of processes and techniques to explore my interpretation of filters and textures in this respect.

Squaring The Circles of Confusion Exhibition

Press release for our Squaring the Circles of Confusion exhibition in April at the Royal Photographic Society.