Maro Vandoru: Fragmented Light

Headed down to the Newspace garage sale this morning–they cleaned out a storage room full of darkroom and lighting equipment–and just missed the hordes fighting over the last of the lighting equipment that I really, really wanted to buy.

Drat. I did pick up a couple of old processing trays at a sinful price; they’ll make dandy water trays for hand-padding my pate de verre. But mostly, I was disappointed to miss all the good stuff…so I wandered into the gallery and discovered I hadn’t missed the REALLY good stuff at all: Maro Vandoru’s Fragmented Light show definitely put the trip in the plus column.

I was lucky to see it, because it closes tomorrow (9/28/08). Vandoru (it’s a she) resurrects platinum/palladium photoprinting for 13 eerily beautiful images of a Greek cemetery. Her works hang on tissue-thin “mounts” suspended on wire; as you approach they’re attracted to the static electricity in your body and gently waft your way.

Vandoru’s printing process is an arduous one, and virtually a trip through photographic history:

• She starts in the dark ages, shooting her images with a pinhole camera (a Holga, for those familiar with this stuff).
• She moves to mid-20th century, developing and printing the resulting film in the darkroom.
• At that point, she enters the digital age, scanning the print into a high-resolution scanner, correcting it and printing the resulting image on a transparent mylar sheet, using the latest inkjet printer.
• The mylar gives her a full-sized “negative” of her original image, suitable for making contact prints, and she dives into early 1800s to print them using a platinotype process.

Modern photographic paper embeds silver in a gelatin-like surface coating; when exposed to light, the silver turns dark. Platinotypes, on the other hand, don’t use a gel coating but instead coat the paper with a platinum/palladium-containing solution that sinks into the paper a bit, giving you a very different surface.

The cognoscenti of B&W photography much prefer platinum prints since they offer a wider tonal range than silver, and a platinotype’s velvety surface radiates light in a way that coated silver papers can’t. The list of photographers favoring platinotypes reads like a who’s who of great photographers: Steiglitz, Cunningham, Steichen, Westin.

One other great advantage of platinotypes is that–to the best of my knowledge, anyway–the paper isn’t sold commercially, being too daggone expensive to produce. Platinum photographers are forced to make their own stock, or pay someone a small fortune to do it…so they can get creative about the media they use to hold the platinum/palladium solution.

In Vandoru’s case, she’s using Japanese gampi paper, an extremely fine (and expensive) paper made of a special type of inner tree bark. It looks a little bit like Tyvek, about as lightweight as tissue paper but with a softer hand and a beautiful sheen. The prints are mounted on more gampi paper, hung about a foot away from the wall and allowed to swing freely. It’s a great display choice–the light coming behind the translucent gampi gives the work an ethereal glow.

The combination of techniques and materials, in fact, is really what makes this show, and that’s a problem. The historotechnical virtuosity renders the subject matter almost irrelevant; I suspect Vandoru could have shot pictures of the phone book and had almost as much success. Subject matter and line were strong enough to overcome process in only one or two works (such as #9, above). The rest of the content wasn’t bad, but kinda passed in a pleasant blur while I looked at the gorgeous display.

In addition, Vandoru’s work was paired with Kay Denton’s “Leafsmoke” exhibit of goldtone prints. They’re certainly lovely photos, worlds better content than Vandoru’s. Unfortunately, the standard presentation (framed, hung on the wall) suffers by comparison with Vandoru’s ethereal display. It’s an interesting juxtaposition but not really fair to Denton; she’d be better off in a separate show.

Anyway, for those who will be near glassland tomorrow; try and catch the exhibit before it goes down. It’s well worth seeing.

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