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Cracking Coburn by Chris Dickie, from Ag30 |
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The approach of 31 Studio - fine art printers Paul and Max Caffell (father and son) and colleague Dominic Burd - has been to match Coburn’s originals as closely as possible. Using prints from the RPS Collection for comparison made this part of the task somewhat easier, however Coburn’s prints from the same negative do vary and so a view was taken to ‘capture the essence’ of what he was trying to achieve. And this was not always straightforward: for instance, some areas of the gum printing required fogging-in in order to mimic Coburn’s results. As always the starting point for a contact printing ‘alternative’ process is the paper base and this itself posed some early problems brought to light by the double printing required for the gum platinum prints and the attendant need for maintenance of registration. The problem lay in not so much the choice of paper - Arches Aquarelle 300gsm watercolour stock - but its pre-treatment. It is a long established practice among those who coat their own printing papers to soak and wash the paper first for, say, a couple of hours. This is to remove the size; it is not, however, as 31 Studio discovered, long enough to fully shrink the paper. With the two-hour wash they found shrinkage was taking place between making the platinum/palladium element of the image and the secondary gum bichromate print, and this made accurate registration of the contact negative for the second print impossible. After some experimentation an optimum washing/soaking time of 10-12 hours was hit upon. In each case the source image was Coburn’s original camera negative and these came in a range of sizes and quality; to suit 31 Studio’s working methods new contact internegatives were produced from these. The film of choice for the internegs was Agfa N31P of which, having now been discontinued, stocks exist but are scarce; so films from Berrger (Linhof & Studio in the UK) and Aristatone (USA) were also used. Next Page >> |
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August Rodin |
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Click on the detail to view full frame. All images by Alvin Langdon Coburn Page 2 of 3 |
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