Light Sensitive 2017 – Celebrating Images from the Darkroom

A Juried Exhibition Celebrating Images from the Darkroom

Art Intersection presents our sixth annual Light Sensitive exhibition in the North and South Galleries. We are pleased to announce curator, teacher, photographer and Director of Rayko Photo Center, Ann M. Jastrab, as this year’s juror. 

Light Sensitive, an exhibition dedicated to presenting art created using traditional darkroom and alternative photographic processes, has grown to become an internationally acknowledged signature exhibition for this art genre. In the current trend of imagery presented on computer screens and the overwhelming volume of digitally printed pictures, Light Sensitive reaffirms and
promotes the art of handcrafted prints that uniquely belong to the tradition of light sensitive creative processes.

Work this year comes from national and international artists and includes processes like cyanotype, gelatin silver, gum bichromate, wet plate collodion tintype, carbon printing, and more. 

The Art Intersection curatorial staff will select three artists from Light Sensitive to show additional work in the forthcoming exhibition, (re)View.

Juror’s Statement

In graduate school in 1993, I took my first and subsequently last Photoshop class. I realized the technology was going to change rapidly and dramatically and constantly and…need I mention the frustrations of Photoshop before layers? (I imagine more than one of you is heading to the kitchen to pour a drink right now just remembering those early days). Anyway, thanks to this experience, my concentration in graduate school quickly became historical processes. I put away my 35mm camera and picked up a wooden view camera and started making my own emulsions and studying all those beautiful techniques from the 1850s onward. I eventually settled on platinum/palladium printing as my medium.

Needless to say, I was thrilled when Alan Fitzgerald from the Art Intersection asked me to jury the 2017 Light Sensitive exhibition. Having a chance to revisit the traditional photographic processes that are near and dear to my heart has been so rewarding. And inspiring. I’m fairly certain that if I go to hell, I’ll be making 4 color gum bichromate prints for eternity and that every time I submerge the paper with the fourth layer perfectly registered, all the layers will float off and I’ll have to start over. And yet, in this coming exhibition, many artists proved that they were not just up for the task of making gum prints, but they made exquisite ones. I take my hat off to Diana Bloomfield, Michael Puff, Megan Smith, Jane Wiley, and the rest who not only had all their layers adhere to the paper, but created superb images.

And then there are the collodion artists….painstakingly poured plates, the pressure of time, of drying emulsion, of moving subjects, of so many variables that can either destroy the image or elevate it to an otherworldly plane where I marvel at how the imperfections make it all the more strange and wondrous. I’ve watched Jenny Sampson’s skateboarder series for years and was excited to put her work in this show along with Tabitha Soren’s baseball tintypes from her long-term project, “Fantasy Life.” And then there were wet plate artists I didn’t know or whose work I didn’t recognize, and the thrill of discovery was upon me, along with the tough decision about which plates to select from Katy Tuttle, Shari Trennert, Rebecca Ross, Kaden Kratzer and Nadezda Nikolova-Kratzer.

The sublime blues of the cyanotypes and the dynamic tonal range of all those platinum/palladium prints and the photogravures and what must be an orotype, the lumen prints, the chromogenic prints, and to see Mordançage prints again (another old nemesis from graduate school – we experimented with this in advance B&W craft, respirators strapped on, gloves snapped on, ventilation systems on high, and stood back and watched as the emulsion lifted off of our gelatin silver prints and, with varying degrees of success, were either transformed into shimmering veils of shadows and light, or more frequently, we witnessed the emulsion wash right off the print and flow into the sink and swirl down the drain. The reaction was usually tears, but sometimes laughter. Another reason I decided to become a platinum printer. There are masochists and there are artists that enjoy making prints… the Mordançage process separated us swiftly. Alex Krajkowski and Judyta Grudzien, you know who you are). And of course, all the gorgeous silver gelatin prints…the birth of my love of photography happened in my high school darkroom thousands of miles from here and decades ago.

The power of this year’s Light Sensitive exhibition lies not just in the fact that these artists are keeping traditional photography and historic techniques alive, but that they’ve also created images that speak to the processes and also speak to us, the viewers. Bravo!

Ann Jastrab, February 2017

About the Juror

Ann M. Jastrab is currently the gallery director at RayKo Photo Center located in the SOMA arts district in San Francisco. RayKo is a comprehensive photographic facility with rental darkrooms, digital labs, studio and galleries creating opportunities for regional, national and international artists to create and present their work, in addition to providing a thriving artist-in-residence program. Ann, MFA, is a fine art photographer, master printer, and teacher as well, and she has curated many exhibitions for RayKo as well as juried exhibitions for the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Academy of Art in San Francisco, Artspan, SFAI, the Center for Fine Art Photography, and other national and international venues outside of San Francisco.

Images in Light Sensitive 2017

Featured Artists

Angela Adams, Jan Aldelhof, Jason Andrescavage, Syl Arena, Gwen Arkin, Charles Berger, Brad Biedenbender, Diana Bloomfield, Ginette Clément, Dennis L. Collins, Douglas Collins, Wendy Constantine, Matthew Covarrubias, shesaidred, Chuck Davis, An Debie, Margo Duvall, Anne Eder, Barbara Elliott, Joanna Epstein, Ernesto Esquer, Angela Franks Wells, Bill Franson, Georgina Marie, Fuentes, Michael Anthony Gonzales, Judyta Grudzien, Michael C. Hughes, Jeannie Hutchins, Karen Hymer, Diana Nicholette Jeon, Emily Johnston, Alex Krajkowski, Jane B. Lindsay, Conni Lowell, Chris Maliga, Erin Malone, Lloyd Matthews, Marek Matusz, Vera Miljkovic, Neil A. Miller, Nadezda Nikolova-Kratzer & Kaden Kratzer, George Omorean, Cyd Peroni, Elizabeth Z. Pineda, Roy Pope, Morgan Post, Michael Puff, Paula Riff, Denise Ross, Rebecca Ross, Jenny Sampson, Kimberly Schneider, Lynne Senzek, Rebecca Sexton Larson, Sara Silks, Deborah Silvis, Megan Smith, Tabitha Soren, Eugene Starobinskiy, Patricia Swanson, J. E. Syme, Brianna Tadeo, Shari Trennert, Katy Tuttle, Fred Ullrich, Karel Van Gerven, Phoebe VanGelder, Jane A.Wiley, Ryan Zoghlin

Header image credit, left to right: Vera Miljkovic, Eugene Starobinskiy, and Bill Franson