Much of my photography today builds on past photography masters, I do a lot of old photographic process such as Gum Bichromate, which was the choice of printing process of the master Pictorialist photographers in the 1880s and 1890s.
I have won several awards for my photography and have exhibited my gum prints in solo exhibitions and within groups. I recently had a gum bichromate portrait accepted by the London Salon of Photography (a great joy because my hero, Robert Demachy also exhibited gum bichromate prints in the Salon in the early 1900s, over a hundred years ago).
The photographs begin as digital, with the pre-printing processing done in Photoshop and negatives printed digitally on large colour-separation film. At this point it becomes analogue, many of the negatives I often purposefully distressed by hand. All these images are then printed on high-cotton paper that has been hand-sized and hand-prepared with the chemistry in my own darkroom using the Maskell-Demachy original recipe published in 1897.
Although the gum bichromate process had its heyday back the late 1800s, it still has sharp meaning today. Because of the brush strokes in the chemistry and its reactions within the paper itself, the final gum prints are unique and uncopiable: they are true monoprints and completely non-fungible.
