The Photographer's Eye: A Creative Collective

JUROR'S CHOICE Matusz: "Pink Peonies"JUROR'S CHOICE
Pink Peonies
Marek Matusz

Media: Four layer/four color Gum bichromate on Fabriano Artistico cold press paper
Print Size: 11x14
Price $550

Artist Bio:
I was born in Poland, but have lived in the United States for over four decades and call Houston, Texas my home. My interests in photography go back over 50 years to my first, all manual Russian-made 35 mm camera. Botanical still lives and the landscape of the American West are my favorite subjects. I have spent a lot of time traveling in the West with my 4x5 Toyo view camera, switching to digital capture recently. I always saw the wor1d around me in black and white and for years I was a classical B&W photographer making silver gelatin prints.
I admired turn of the century platinum and albumen prints in various museums and collections, but always thought that the process of making them was too expensive and complicated. I started making alternative photographs about 30 years ago and have not looked back. I am currently working in several alternative photographic processes including cyanotype, platinum / palladium, albumen but gum bichromate is by far my favorite.
The technical issues of making these photographs are immense and require lots of practice during which hundreds of bad prints are made. The exciting part is that every step allows for a creative control of the final image. From the selection of best art papers, through mixing my own chemistry, applying photosensitive solution to papers, selecting pigments and metals, finally exposure and processing. All is done by hand, one photograph at a time creating a unique work of art that you can hold in your hand.
Last year I started experimenting with blending hand painted watercolor backgrounds with photographs of flowers to create prints that look more like watercolor paintings than photographs. Gum bichromate is the best medium to express my creative process, as it is all hand-made and allows to select colors/pigments. With each pigmented layer color image is build up to arrive at final look of the print. Two prints at the exhibit are examples of this recent work.

Juried Images

JUROR'S STATEMENT:
Making a final selection is always difficult because there are so many works worthy of exhibition beyond the ones chosen. Though I was able to narrow down an exhibition to around 40 works from 33 artists, there were an equal number of images in my “runner up” file.

The works chosen represent a broad range of processes: collage, gum bichromate, hand colored albumen, pinhole, lumen, gold-toned salted paper, cyanotype toned and untoned, ziatype, polaroid lifts, chromo, encaustic, chrysotype, chrysotype over ink jet, platinum/palladium, gum over kallitype, chlorophyll over platinum/palladium, platinum/palladium over pigment, tintype, xerox transfer on wood, gum over cyanotype, gold-leafed vellum, and gum over kallitype. The range of processes in this exhibition illustrate that handcrafted prints are alive and well. Artists are often combining processes in their final prints which shows a level of expertise, conceptual thinking, and willingness to experiment which I find quite exciting.

Process is never the whole story, though; an image has to first be well-executed visually. Some examples that come to mind are Tom Wise’s spiny cactus (gum over kallitype) and “cactus landscape,” Travis Lovell’s moody, pictorial tintype, Barbara Wilson’s hand colored albumen with the age-old theme of the alluring apple, David Marsh’s confident road runner, Denise Oehl’s primordial foggy landscape, Jodie Hulden’s softly lit trees, Louise Russell’s juxtaposed wild landscape/ wild graffiti, Lynne Buchanan’s twisty path, Oriana Poindexter’s documentation of sea plants, Robert Oehl’s soft-focus nude...every selection in the show has something noteworthy like this about it.

The Juror’s Choice award goes to Marek Matusz, specifically his Peonies gum bichromate work. It is a standout for me for two reasons: he had used the gum bichromate process in a unique and more painterly way than is typically done today with gum printing, and he has integrated the border of the gum print effectively with the image—the border doesn’t compete, but compliments. That is harder to do than it seems, actually!

I thank The Photographer’s Eye Collective and Gallery for allowing me to be the juror for this show and I thank all artists for taking time to submit their work to it. I loved spending time with each and every submission, living their creativity vicariously. It will certainly be an exciting show to visit in person.

Christina Z. Anderson

CLICK ON IMAGES TO VIEW ARTIST DETAILS

DIRECTOR'S CHOICE McCorkle: "Curiosity #7"

Buchanan: "The Only Choice is to Follow the Light"

Lovell: "ASPIDISTRA AND LAKESIDE POWER STATION"