A new photographer (or 3) each week.
For her series of River Taw images, Susan Derges goes to creeks and river beds during the day and suspends flash guns high in tree limbs. At night she returns, places a sheet of color photographic paper in the creek and fires the flashes, exposing the paper. The flash and ambient light cast shadows of the tree branches and the water flowing over the paper.
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Robert Adams has been one of my favorite photographers and photography critics ever since my college photo teacher introduced me to him about six years ago. He has written books, including Beauty in Photography and Why People Photograph that have served as, and to which I turn regularly for, a great inspiration and influence on my photography.
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Getty Museum
PBS Art 21 Documentary Bio
New Topographics Wikipedia Entry
James Hajicek and Carol Panaro-Smith collaborate in making photograms of plants, “photogenic drawings” using very much the same techniques and chemical formulas William Henry Fox Talbot used.
Plants that we either dug from the earth or collected from the sea are exposed in contact with hand-coated light sensitive paper. This organic material withers under the intense heat and light of the Arizona sun as it completes its final act of participation in the creation of its own image.
As opposed to using commercially made photo paper like Jerry Burchfield, the duo hand-coats paper with light sensitive chemistry:
As we continued to work with variations of William Henry Fox Talbot’s basic chemical formulas, we discovered that altering the variables of the light sensitive solutions, the chemistry in the paper, the intensity and accompanying heat of the light, and the chemicals emerging from the organic material, a color palette and physical presence emerged in the final print creating an ‘organic artifact’ beyond the imagination of anything previously thought of as photographic
![06-4[1].jpg](http://www.52photographers.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/06-41.jpg "06-4[1].jpg")
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This week I’m digging into the past, and presenting Carleton Watkins. I have always been fascinated with History. When I was registering and deciding on a major for college I was deciding between History and Photography. I chose photography, and the rest, as they say, is, well, history. So it is only natural for me to have a keen interest in the history of photography. Some of my favorite processes for my own photography are historic/alternative processes, i.e., carbon printing, cyanotypes, etc…
Many of the first photographs people see of the Yosemite Valley are those done by Ansel Adams. Indeed, they are very beautiful photographs of a very beautiful place, and still rank among my most favorite photographs. I recall the first time I saw a Carleton Watkins photograph in my History of Photography class in college, I thought I was looking at an Ansel Adams photograph.
After moving to San Jose from New York, and later moved to San Francisco, Watkins began photographing the Yosemite Valley as official photographer for the California State Geological Survey, using both a mammoth camera and a stereo camera.
Maybe it’s from my fascination with history, or my affinity for the aesthetic of an albumen print from a wet plate collodion negative, but Watkins photographs of Yosemite, specifically, and other photographs, his photographs have surpassed those of Adams for me, in terms of who I prefer.
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