Back in the day ….
The Oakland conference: What Ever Happened to Edward Weston?
Jack Welpott, RWF, Van Dern Coke checking out their new ED WESTON t-shirts
Peter Marshall gets this scene a bit off. I created a super 8 movie for this symposium: What Ever Happened to Edward Weston, Wellpott made the T-shirts. Scott Groeniger has transferred the original footage and tweaked the sound track just in time for the meeting of the South East Regional SPE this week end. It will be shown along with footage from the 1974 National SPE meeting at the George Eastman house, where a good time was had by all.
Peter Marshall on the history of cyanotype.
A few of the ’secessionist’ photographers around the 1900s made use of the cyanotype, but generally it was seen as a proofing medium, or one for amateurs in photography. (See the ‘Stieglitz’ link for more on the photo-secession.) Twentieth Century textbooks of photography - if they made mention of it at all - treated it mainly as a process for reproducing drawings or textile printing. It was not until the revival of interest in printing media and non-silver printmaking of the 1960s that the process was revived for creating fine-art prints by photo-artists such as Robert Fichter (famous for his tee shirt that proclaimed ‘Edward Weston is dead’) that blueprints began to be exhibited in any numbers. Further interest was spurred on by the publication of a number of books dealing with ‘alternative’ printing processes, of which the most influential was William Crawford’s ‘The Keepers of Light’ (1979), still in bookshops recently, although apparently now only available secondhand.
Crawford’s work differed from most in dealing with more than the technical aspects of the work at some depth, as well as in covering a wider range of processes than most with generally workable practical details - unlike some publications. Although looking at the use of cyanotype by Le Secq and others, Crawford also quotes Peter H Emerson’s words from his ‘Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art’ (1889):
‘… no one but a vandal would print a landscape in red, or in cyanotype.’
