Head. Ganesh. Hand. Bhujodi, Gujerat, India. 1995. pt-pd print on vellum.
Contact print from original negative, 8×10 inches.

I am rebuilding my blog, and in the process, deleting old material and reposting what I now think of as more interesting material.

This, from July 20, 2015, is the first of a series of musings about prints in my archives.

Over the next few days, I am going to post image files from scans of actual prints (mostly platinum-palladium). This blog is very much a public notebook, in the sense that I use it to mull over ideas, review older work in order to shape new work, and, of course, share work in progress. At the moment, I’m trying to put the polish on an essay about platinum-palladium printing which, all going well, will be part of a collection of essays about the process and published by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. I’m thinking a lot about physicality – about why and how a photographer makes choices when working in the darkroom and the photographic wet lab, and how and why that should matter to the process of regarding a photographic print.

The images here have all been scanned and presented with minimal adjustment during the scanning stage. To help those who may be interested in such matters, I’m also scanning with a test target. I strongly believe that a print is not finished until matted, so scans have been cropped to hide the process marks and reference targets. However, the full, un-cropped scan will always be appended.