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This Is What I Do

The last few, post digital, years have been in a perverse way, interesting for the chemical photographer. Photographic papers as we knew them disappeared before you ever had the thought of stockpiling them. For myself it was a matter of scrabbling around and dis-covering that Printing Out Paper, which I had last been able to use in 1981was available again and I did manage to get an order for regular photographic paper out of Hungary before both it and POP demised.

Papers have their own characteristics and certain negatives; not all negatives are the same, some suit certain types of paper and chemical combinations that others don’t.

The demise of a paper just after you have started to use it doesn’t give one the confidence to stride forth and make new work without any sort of certainty that there will be the photographic paper to print it on. It does however give you the opportunity to re-discover negatives that should have been but never were, printed and which suit the papers that you have available. So, over this ‘transitional’ period that is what I have been doing. I have whole bodies of accumulated negatives, especially concerning specific subject areas.

The ravages of time are making inroads into the oldest of my negatives. Having some paper and not having the overwhelming imperative to create new work, has created the opportunity to track back and to see what fits [the available paper and chemicals] and to work on compiling some of those subject areas, which of course means that once you start working on them again it provides the impetus to add to the ‘collection’.

This is what I do. This is what I have been doing.

All photographic papers used in this exhibition are now extinct.

-Laurence Aberhart, 2009