What an honor to have you join the discussion. First, I must say I enjoy your suburb work found on the web. And, the instructional leadership you bring to this site also helps raise the knowledge base bar even higher. Kudos to you for your many outstanding contributions!

Thank you, too, for your comments to this particular blog topic. They seem to underline and expand upon my written commentary quite well.

Peter

I especially like your suggestions for developing a personal method of evaluating one’s own work. I’d add that it is often valuable to set new work aside, and revisit it later to evaluate it again. Often, interim experience casts recent work in new light, and can provide new insights into past choices.

External criticism has its uses, and its limits. I appreciate being able to see work from a new perspective. However, the same print may be loved by one and scorned by another with equal zeal. I attempt to glean some detail that can help me evaluate an image differently from everyone, but ultimately, I rely more heavily on critics who seem to like work by others that I also like.

Elizabeth

I studied and worked in architecture in the 1980s and ’90s, when diazo prints were commonly used in schools and in construction. I “ran” hundreds of diazo prints for my classmates in the architecture lab at my college, and handled thousands of professionally printed diazo prints when I worked in an architecture firm. While the ammonia fumes were horrendous and unhealthy (one of the main motivations to eliminate the process here in California), it was delightful to be able to create such huge copies (24″x36 or even 30″x40″) of one’s own translucent paper drawings for a couple of American dollars. (At the time, other reproduction processes could cost hundreds of dollars for a copy of those sizes.)

The prints were also immediate: there was no waiting, as the machine rolled the diazo paper and the translucent drawing through together against the UV light, making a moving contact print as the papers passed through rollers in the relatively small (but wide) machine, and the fumes developed the image as it came out. I could turn out several a minute on the small, all-manual machine at school; machines at the professional reprographic companies run about one per second with an automated feeder. The machines had varying speeds, with longer exposures for increased density / darkness, and shorter exposures for lighter prints with less background noise.

The process was also capable of other colors: a sepia brown was popular, as was black (which was notoriously unstable, but suitable for fancy presentations). We used different paper for each color, but all were delicate – only slightly stronger than newsprint.

I am not sure how Woodman was made positives large enough to produce such enormous contact prints, but they are epic!

The conservators of this work have my deepest sympathy – it’s tough to preserve work made with such a temporary process on delicate pulp paper.

Elizabeth Graves

If you can email me as well as posting here, I would be grateful.

Thanks!

Nan Hawthorne
hawthorne@nanhawthorne.com