Printing with Gum Bichromate
Printing with Gum Bichromate
Instructor: Christina Z. Anderson
This workshop will focus on the expressive quality of the gum bichromate process. Students will begin contact printing their negatives in multiple layers of pigmented gum emulsion. Watercolor and printmaking paper will be used as a support to print saturated images from a broad palette of color. Various light-resists may be used such as: large format negatives (4×5 and larger), pinhole, enlarged negatives, inkjet transparencies, cliché-verre, drawings on acetate and virtually anything that will block out varying amounts of light. Day two will explore more in-depth techniques such as tri-color gum, print manipulation, and guidelines for mixing chemistry and colors as well as paper sizing. This is an ideal workshop for those who have experimented on their own or taken a beginner level workshop and would like exposure to more advanced topics and information.
Students should bring: 2 - 4 large format negatives (see above).
Class is limited to 10 participants.
Location: Pittsburgh Filmmakers
Date: May 30 & 31, 2009
Time: 9:00am to 5:00pm
Tuition: $275
Materials fee: $35 (payable directly to Christine)
Gum Bichromate image ‘Handstand’ by Christina Z. Anderson
About Christina Z. Anderson
Christina Z. Anderson’s work centers on the contemporary social landscape rendered in historic photographic processes. Dialogues between humor and tragedy, the banal and the sublime, beauty and ugliness, and acting and passing are themes that run through her work. Anderson came to photography through painting, and has been greatly influenced by Pop Art and Photorealism, movements with which she shares a love of the vernacular, direct and bold subject matter, gender issues, and color and texture.
Process is a very integral part of Anderson’s work. “Hands-on processes allow me to connect to my work in a more direct, intimate way. Creativity may begin in the camera, but in the darkroom and now dimroom an ordinary image can blossom and become much more unique. This sometimes unpredictable transformation of an image through processes such as mordancage or gum printing requires acceptance, flow, and commitment to the creative process–a real command to ‘be here now’. In my method of working, process is not separated from content but many times results in much more content than what was there in the original in-camera image.”
Anderson received her first undergraduate degree in French from the University of Minnesota, her second and third undergraduate degrees in painting and photography from Montana State University, and her MFA in photography from Clemson University in 2005. She is a national board member of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE), an educational board member for Freestyle Photographic Supplies, and a College Arts Association (CAA) member. She has authored three books: Tutti Nudi, Reflections on the Reemergence of the Nude during the Italian Renaissance, The Experimental Photography Workbook, and Alternative Processes, Condensed: A Manual of Gum Dichromate and Other Contact Printing Processes. In the works is a comprehensive book on the history and practice of gum printing. Currently, Anderson is Assistant Professor of Photography at Montana State University, Bozeman, Montana, where she teaches alternative processes, experimental photography, and nonfiction photography.
