I love paper. I love the smooth, satiny feel of a blue writing paper for letters home or thank yous. I love the onion-skin whisper of airmail paper, where we had to use blotting paper regularly to keep one side of lettering from becoming mirrored words on the reverse. I love handmade khadi paper made from recycled clothes. I love Reeves watercolour for salt printing, Hahnemulhe platinum rag for Cyanotypes, bamboo rag for giclee printing. Being a practising alternative photographer means I am allowed to indulge my paper habit officially.
Botanical stain assessment
In Japan where paper is still (just about) an art form, they have Goddesses to thank. Always by water, the shrines are offered prayers and little votives. (I’m hoping these are origami flowers, the circle met). The mineralogy of the water impacts the final form of these hand-made laid papers, treasured now and treasured before by those as remote but engaged as da Vinci. Paper found its way via the Silk Roads to Italy and beyond. Mulberry papers. Paper as thin and delicate as the Indian muslins going the other way.
Cyanotype salts react with varying papers in different ways. Platinum Rag behaves itself, rarely offers up surprises. Indian khadi paper is like dealing with the Indian Railways pre-computerisation, an unpredictable paper with the occasional wild outcome. It suits me for certain days.
The light-sensitive coating is applied under dimroom conditions. I have a difficult time with the glass rod technique when I wear latex gloves, and sometimes I prefer to use my Hake brush and pray to the Goddesses that the coatings won’t pool and the paper will clear when I wash it. Coating papers takes about two to three hours for twelve 10x8” papers and some khadis. The physical process is a couple of minutes, but the drying time forces reflectivity. Making digital negatives takes about an hour per image. And exposing the images in the UV box I made takes about eighteen minutes. Eight minutes to wash and tone, fifteen mins under another wash, about an hour to dry. Is that about four hours an image? It’s a seven stage process from beginning to end.
Micro-leaf
The images reflect their paper substrate, their washes, the humidity on the day. Each one is a little artisan miracle. Each one is different. There is, in my world, little excitement about reproducing the same image exactly time and time again. Little differences are to be celebrated, as much as one moon jellyfish in Bosham Creek might be different to the next.
The print runs are tiny, and they won’t be repeated. My time in your hand.
Cyanotypes are sometimes fugitive. This means they might fade. You might choose to live with a artisan paper print that is energetically alive, and embrace the fade, or you can pop the image is a light-tight drawer and regenerate the image. They’re better not hung in sunlight, and UV glass helps.
