Alternative Process, Alternative Mind

New media photojournalism means just that- lots of new media: innovative web design, reporting on the go, apps and experimental audio and video projects.

This semester it also means the darkroom. Specifically an alternative practices class focusing on 19th century photo processes. Having learned everything I know about photography on a digital camera it is in fact a new media.

My very first darkroom print.
Photo by Caroline Lacey

(One reason I decided to take the class was because of the amazingly brilliant and knowledgeable professor, Margaret Adams.)

So far it has felt a world away from the NMPJ program but they inform each other in ways I never expected. For instance I had spent this past summer in West Africa photographing exploited girls. It was all photographed digitally and I kept the project in its truthful color. I chose a few of those images to print in the salted paper process, the very first photo process. They came out beautifully, stroked like a painting. The seemingly endless hours of work turned out a handful of precious objects.
We compared the two versions on the wall– the bright digital computer slide show and the sepia toned mounted prints– and the disparity was glaring. All of the immediate life in the color images had been shaped into something that seemed to most closely resemble a haunting apparition– an accidental encounter with the past. It was like I was looking at someone else’s photographs, one of the damaging colonial images used as souvenirs in the late 19th century.

An experiment in salted paper printing led this to be my print so far. The original negative is from my time in West Africa this summer documenting exploited girls.
Photo by Caroline Lacey

Although I didn’t like how the process affected the meaning of the prints, I liked the way I was seeing them and the ownership I felt over how they were viewed. The alternative process got my mind thinking in alternative ways.

Every week or two we learn a new process and with each new process I am opened in different ways. And while this semester it is darkroom printing there are endless possibilities of nuancing my education.

I’m thinking book design for next semester-