Vox linea, platinum EPC, edition #17, pt 1
Hello,
Hope this finds you well. Spring is definitely in the air here, tons of new growth on the climbing rose on the back of the house, and tulip tips pushing up out of the pots. The promise of colour and excitement to come in just a couple of months time. I have to say I love this time of year, the days are getting longer, and everything seems freighted with possibility.
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Edition #17. Vox linea, platinum EPC
I've been talking to, and negotiating with, Max Caffell at 31 Studio, The Platinum Printroom, and he has very graciously agreed to make an edition for us. Which I think is a really exciting prospect.
31 Studio has a long history of making platinum prints for some of the biggest names in photography, including Don McCullin, Sebastião Salgado, Idris Khan and the Fox Talbot museum at Lacock, the birthplace of modern photography.
© Idris Khan - Link to his Saatchi Gallery page here
From the 31 Studio web
Link here to watch a short film about the studio
'The 31 Studio / Platinum Printroom is the foremost specialist for Platinum and Platinum-Palladium printing in the United Kingdom.
We were the first dedicated workshop to be specifically set up, to revive this lost art.'
The Studio has the capability to create prints from multiple sources, such as the historic glass negatives of Jacques Henri Lartigue, through all the many generations of film negatives, positives and prints, on to present day digital files.
We have our own Imacon / Hasselblad scanner enabling us to produce maximum quality scans in-house, for the creation of the digital inter-negatives, that we now use.
Platinum printing is a contact printing process and our ability to create any size of negatives that we may need, has enabled us to make Platinum and Platinum/Palladium prints as large as 120 x 85 cm.'
© Sebastião Salgado - Link here to view Genesis
I'm really looking forward to working with a process that encapsulates so much history and intrigue, and in a studio that has seen some of the biggest names in photography pass through.
The Platinum process is really quite expensive, perhaps unsurprisingly, so for this edition I'll be making something quite small! A poem really. But I don't see that as any kind of problem, indeed it may well be a positive. There's something to be said for having a few external constraints to help narrow the choices down a little. As we all know, too much choice can be overwhelming. Certainly back when I was making more overtly commercial work for art directors, the brief often created a tension and jumping off point that could really help generate new material, although it could often be a constraining straitjacket too!
It'll be interesting to see how the work progresses over the next month or so. The studio is in Stroud, fairly local to us, so I may even be able to make a visit to see the process in action. That would be beautiful, if it's at all possible with the lockdown still in place, we'll see.
I've asked Max to take some images of the work in progress, so that we'll have some visual reference points for the blog, and just for interest really.
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I'm going to send a second post now, with what I thought was some really rather fabulous writing by Liam Gillick, that I think you may enjoy. I did! It seemed to bump me out of my day to day thoughts for a moment, to somewhere altogether more expansive, which is of course very welcome...
More soon - best - Chuck
