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A tissue of lies by Tim Daly, from Ag26 |
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Tim Daly shows you how to apply some simple digital trickery to recreate the carbon tissue process, one of the most demanding vintage printing techniques During a visit to New York and while fatigued from intensive sightseeing, I was drawn into a sleek silver DKNY shop on Firth Avenue. There next to an assortment of severely coloured jeans was a neat stack of expensive photography monographs. Not the kind of bargain bookstore encyclopaedias of fashion photography of the '50s and so on, but the very best catalogues from some very astute dealers of fine photography. One book stood out, an immaculately printed catalogue of Josef Sudek’s carbon prints, the kind of book you rarely see in a photography bookstore, let alone an upmarket jeans shop. Sudek as it turns out, restricted by the apparent lack of sensitivity offered by conventional gelatin silver materials, made a body of work using a nineteenth century printing process. For about seven years in the late forties and early fifties, he reprinted many of his finest images using a pigment printing process on fine rag paper, the kind of material usually reserved for artists. Sudek was drawn to a more tactile kind of outcome for his images, a kind of paper that could echo his feelings for an older and better kind of photography. The pigment process shares many of the advantages of today’s innovative digital printing techniques by using tactile papers and a wider range of image tones permitted by conventional photographic toners. In fact, apart from completely dissimilar processes involved, the end results can appear very closely matched. Sudek’s prints were made using carbon tissue, a process that transferred the image onto a receiving sheet of cotton paper. Like lifting off the emulsion of a peel-apart Polaroid and placing on paper, the carbon tissue process brought with it four fabulously delicate edges of unexposed tissue surrounding the final image. These edges accompanied the image like a signature and defined the print as a hand made entity in its own right. Next Page >> |
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• A 'Photoshop' Carbon print © Tim Daly Page 1 of 3 |
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