project two: emulation

Emulation - Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966)

In the early 20th century Coburn was a leading figure in the Pictorialism movement, photographers seeking to emulate the Impressionist movement in painting.

I became interested in Coburn's work through a series of architectural prints he made in London in the early 20th century. Using a soft-focus lens, his prints romanticize the industrial city: the architecture along the Thames masked by a grayish haze with spatial edges and planes dissipating into the ethereal London Fog.

These prints are an attempt to achieve a similar effect utilizing the process of creating paper negatives. I peeled the plastic top layers off of my original RC prints and then used them to create paper negatives. These were then exposed to produce the final fiber prints. At this point, the repeated process of exposing paper on paper had blurred the details of the original photographs.

FINAL PRINTS

PAPER NEGATIVES

INITIAL PRINTS