Alternative Processes

Early in my photographic life, I took a week long workshop with Frank Gohlke on advanced black and white darkroom printing. We discussed toning, bleaching, and brightening of silver gelatin prints, but also experimented with a few different alternative processes - cyanotype, kallitype, and palladium. When I set up my first studio, I was just out of college and didn't have much money. Familiar with a few alternative processes, I picked up a copy of The Keepers of Light by William Crawford and The Gum Bichromate Book by David Scopick, determined to make my prints under the rich Colorado sun. After entering graduate school, for years alternative process photography became my bread and butter, and spent over a decade teaching these types of processes to undergraduate and graduate students in Boston and New York. My interest in and success with a variety of photographic processes ultimately led to my first book contract with Oxford University Press, Alternate Processes in Photography. Below is a selection of pictures made using platinum/palladium, gum bichromate, kallitype, cyanotype, wet plate collodion, and prints made layering different processes on top of one another. The picture to the left is a tintype made during a wet plate workshop with John Coffer.

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