KENT—A very personal view of the Grand Canyon is on view at the FotoDiary Gallery, 3 Barn Rd., this month. Photographer and teacher Scott Parker of Kent is exhibiting a series of photogravure images of the canyon taken during a 16-day excursion along the Colorado River. The show will be up until Aug. 1.
“I had seen the river from the top before and am a whitewater fan. A group and I started planning a winter trip to the bottom,” he related.
He said planning for the trip coincided with his taking a teaching position at Fairleigh Dickinson in New Jersey, where he met the head of the art department, David Hanson. Hanson had a collection of photo-mechanical prints that has since been acquired by the Clark Institute of Art in Williamstown, Mass.
Parker explained that traditional photographic prints are created on paper through chemical interactions, but different processes are needed to translate the photos to a printed page. Photomechanical prints use ink and are not light sensitive.
“From a printing perspective, magazines had to have a way to get the images onto the page. People wanted to put out their camera work and they wanted to use the highest quality reproduction so, during the early history of photography, they explored all these strategies,” he said.
“My partner wanted to explore photogravure and, knowing I was trained as a printmaker, we collaborated to learn how photogravure was made. I did the heavy lifting to research the process and the information I could find was disparate, with a lot of misinformation. Figuring out this process and taking the Grand Canyon trip was really a nod to the history of early West and the history of photography. Many of the early photographs were printed in publications at the same time that the West was opening up and being recorded by early photographers.”
He said it took the better part of a school year to figure out how the prints were made. “There was a lot of experimentation,” he said. He eventually recorded the process so others could see it at https://youtu.be/0HkvxnO22s4?feature=shared.
On Friday, July 26, FotoDiary will hold a large gathering on the lawn in front of the gallery and will screen a 30-minute documentary about the Colorado River and host a casual round table with whitewater athletes and photographers.
The end result is largely what the early photographers experienced. “From a visual standpoint, the images are a little grainy and don’t have the same dynamic range as a modern photo but it produces more than enough information. From an archival standpoint, these prints could last 500 years, far longer than any modern photo.
To increase the perception of age in his prints he “played around, scuffing the edges to let the pictures fall off.”
“Linking back to the canyon, it is the product of erosion and I got a little obsessed with that idea,” he said.
In real time, Parker, who trained in printmaking and painting, is also a professional photograph doing fashion photography and corporate work. He continues to teach: a history of photography course online and one day a week in the classroom at Fairleigh Dickinson teaching digital photography.
He has made his home in Northwest Connecticut for the past 15 years.
