Western Goat's Beard and Gunnison's Mariposa Lily

I made a couple of technical changes that gave me some subtle improvements. I heated my potassium oxalate to 190F (88C) and adjusted exposure and development time (negatives). I’m super happy with these results. The warm tone improved tremendously! It’s very obvious now where before it was very subtle. I like the warm tones much better.

There’s really no comparison when you can control the (north) actinic light for wet or dry collodion negatives. The results are amazing. You would have to see these Palladium/Platinum prints in person to fully appreciate them. There are subtleties that can only be seen in real life. I wonder sometimes if I should even post these. The iPhone is the best I can do for copies - you get the idea, I’m sure. I do use this blog as a journal and a reference point for myself. I can see where I improve or when I need improvement. I know a lot of you enjoy seeing these so I try to post every time I have a successful day. I hope you enjoy these.

GUNNISON'S MARIPOSA LILY

A tea of the plant was taken internally by the Native Americans to treat rheumatic swellings and to ease the delivery of the placenta. Juice of the leaves were applied to pimples.

Blue Hair Grass and Little Cat's Eye

Have you ever heard the saying, “practice makes progress”? I think I’m on my way. Keeping my head down and doing the work.

I did a rough count of my negatives and I’m almost at 100 plates. I’ve been averaging about 10 plates a week (5 - 7 days). That’s a lot of glass! I purchased 200 plates to do this project. I’m working in Whole Plate for reasons I’ve explained before. And I’m printing (primarily) Palladium Platinum. I will (and have) made Rawlins Oil prints of this work, but the goals I have for this will be Palladium Platinum prints.

I hope to be finished with the majority of the flora work by the end of next month. We do have two trips planned for this month - Tava Kaavi (Pikes Peak) and Garden of the Gods. Everything else will be local landscapes, flora, and objects near me. If you read my statement, you’ll see where I’m headed. This project becomes clearer and clearer to me each day. I’m grateful for that. For me, it’s very important work and I’m compelled to make it. I have a possibility to get it in the right place (I’ll announce it next year) for posterity. I hope I can make that happen.

For now, I just take each day and enjoy it. It’s my escape. I’m transported, or in the zone while in the process of making this work. It’s several hours each day that I’m alone and away from the computer, social media, news, and all of the noise we have to endure each day. It’s a real relief and I’m very grateful to be doing it.

LITTLE CAT'S EYE

Native American groups crushed and boiled some Cryptantha species for external use as a lotion for itching, boils, and fatigued limbs.

TIP NUMBER 209: My negatives (both wet and dry) are strong and vigorous because of the correct amount of salts in the collodion. The iodides are very important. I also follow Sutton’s advice about bromides. Very little double decomposition occurs in 2 - 3 minutes - you need more time for the process to take place.

Buffalo Plum and Slendertube Skyrocket

I’m back in the studio making negatives and prints of these incredible plants up here. Today, I made negatives of two varieties; a Buffalo Plum plant and a Slendertube Skyrocket plant.

One plant is purple (Buffalo Plum) and the other a “peach color”. Wet Collodion sees these colors very differently. It’s a challenge to make exposures that will capture everything. I have to sacrifice some part of the image for another when there’s a three or four stops difference.

SLENDERTUBE SKYROCKET

Ipomopsis tenuituba is a species of flowering plant in the phlox family known by the common name slendertube skyrocket, or slendertube ipomopsis. It is native to much of the western United States. In Colorado, it is found on rocky mountain slopes. This is a perennial herb producing an erect stem with widely spaced leaves, each 3 to 6 centimeters long and with many narrow, fingerlike lobes. The inflorescences toward the top of the stem each hold three to seven flowers. The flower is very pale to medium pink, sometimes with white streaks, or solid white. It is a tube 2 to 5 centimeters long, opening into a corolla of five twisting, pointed, ribbonlike lobes. The stamens and style do not protrude far from the mouth of the flower, if at all. While it is a perennial plant, it dies after its first flowering.

New Collodion Dry Plate Negatives and Prints

I took a break from the flora photographs and took some collodion dry plates out and made some negatives. These are very reliable and convenient in so many ways. The exposure time can be a problem if you have wind or bad weather, other than that, they are wonderful to work with. In my studio, I use all wet collodion negatives. My darkroom and studio is super nice for the flora work or any still life work - and maybe one day again, portraits.

I made three negatives the other day. I printed one yesterday and these are the other two. I really like the color I can get with toned Kallitypes. The only thing I don’t like is that they use silver - a big archival concern. If your workflow is solid, they will outlast you, no doubt. I like the non-silver prints for that reason. The toned Kallitypes are beautiful though.

I used a Hahnemühle Baryta paper and made a platinum palladium print.

A gold/platinum/palladium toned Kallitype print from a collodion dry plate negative.

A gold/platinum/palladium toned Kallitype print from a collodion dry plate negative.

If you look in the top left corner of this image, you can see Tava. I wanted to show the texture of the giant granite pad. The volcanos here are hundreds of thousands of years old and created all of these.

The mats always help to “finish” these prints.

The Red Road

Keep yourself balanced. Your mental, spiritual, emotional, and physical self need to be strong, pure, and healthy. Work out the body to strengthen the mind. Grow rich in spirit to secure emotional ails. “Walk straight the Red Path and avoid the extremes of life.”

Native American Code of Ethics

The Red Road or the Red Path is the Native spiritual path. Walking the Red Road means living in the moment connected to all that surrounds us, and respecting all of our relations and Mother Earth and Father Sky. It means finding a balance between and attending to our four sides: spiritual, physical, mental, and emotional. It means taking care and respecting ourselves and the Creator. It means being thankful for what we have, taking only what we need, and giving back.

"In the Shadow of Sun Mountain" Artist Statement - Working Draft

In The Shadow of Sun Mountain (Tava Kaavi)

“The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result, he has to make personal sense out of it.”

― Ernest Becker

I want to share both the beauty and the tragedy of this place I call home. Through these photographs, I want to esteem the Ute (Tabegauche) people both past and present. I hope to engage the viewer long enough to put this history and the people into their consciousness.

I live in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado (United States). It’s beautiful and breathtaking here. It’s peaceful and mysterious. And it has a very sordid and sad history. I struggle with living on this land and yet I’m in awe every day of its life, beauty, and mystery.

I’ve approached this work from a place of deference, wonder, sadness, and loss. I’m torn about where I live and what I know. I often think about what happened here and question why it did. It confuses me and creates inner conflict for me; like a type of cognitive dissonance.

What do I do with this terrible history? My answer is to embrace it, study it, wrestle with it and transform it into a weapon for the human spirit; one that will enlarge my sense of responsibility and strengthen my moral resolve.

This project also served as a cathartic release for me. That’s why the work was made. While metaphorical, it’s my way of resolving my relationship with the land, the history, and the people that lived here.

At dawn, Tava-Kaavi (Sun Mountain) is the first Colorado mountain to catch the sun’s rays. The mountain is over 14,000 (4.300m) feet above sea level. The Nuchu/Ute American Indian Tribe believes it’s where Mother Earth meets Father Sky.

Its colonized name is “Pikes Peak”. It was known to the Ute People as “Tava,” meaning “Sun”. The Tabeguache (tab-a-watch), or “People of Sun Mountain,” was the largest of the ten nomadic bands of the Ute. They followed the herds of wild animals throughout their lands, harvesting the elk, deer, and buffalo at specific places at certain times of the year. This lifestyle mandated that they move their camp every three or four weeks. They constructed a medicine wheel at the heart of each new camp, linking them to Mother Earth like an umbilical cord. I live in one of the areas where the Tabegauche lived. This work is about the land, plants, rocks, and trees they dwelt among and used to survive and thrive for a very long time.

I named this body of work, “In the Shadow of Sun Mountain (Tava-Kaavi)” because the photographs are all made literally with the great mountain watching over. Nothing escapes its presence. The Nuchu/Tabegauche knew that, too.

I consider this land as their land. In my mind, nothing has changed in that way. They honored it and respected it, never taking more than they needed. It’s a beautiful place. In a lot of ways, it’s “other-worldly”. The fauna and the flora represent all that the Nuchu loved. The big rock outcroppings were called, “the bones of Mother Earth”. And the huge red rock formations were considered “grandfathers.” Their life here was balanced and good.

The Nuchu/Utes are the longest continuous Indigenous inhabitants of what is now Colorado. According to Nuchu oral history, they have no migration story - they’ve always been here. They were placed within their homelands, on different mountain peaks, to remain close to their Creator. Nuchu ancestors, in order to maintain transmission of cultural knowledge, taught generations through oral history about the narratives and the names ascribed to geophysical places and geological formations within their aboriginal and ancestral territory.

The Prickly Pear Cactus Print - Another Negative

It’s amazing to me how a very slight change in light can completely transform an image. This is the first cactus plate from the other day. I decided to print it and (slightly) gold-tone it. It’s interesting in its own respect. The needles look like starbursts and the deep rich black of the palladium print goes on forever.

Just a different take on the same object. I changed the light a bit and created something completely different. Collodion always has its own story to tell. The color shifts, the tonal shifts, and it responds very differently to the changing light throughout the day. It’s a joy and challenge to work in - I love it. Can you tell?

Also, I turned the comments on for my blog. Feel free to comment here if you’d like. I would enjoy hearing from you. As long as I don’t get spammed, I’ll open the comments on each post for your feedback or input.

Bear-Grass Yucca and Prairie Sage

It was a good day in the studio today. I discover new plants to photograph almost every day. These are just preliminary prints, but I feel terrific where this has gone. I suppose I could do an entire body of work on these plants. I like diversity when I look at a body of work, the landscapes, rock formations, and the trees I’ve made plates of really add dimension - they make the story whole. I’m starting to look at the images together, as a body of work. I can say that I’m on the right track for what I want to accomplish.

I’m going to spend a few hours tomorrow preparing some collodion dry plates. On our walk today, Jeanne and I discovered a beautiful little scene I want to photograph. I think I’ll squeeze that image in between the flora work. I’ve mentioned a few times that some landscape here seems other-worldly. If I get this right, it will really echo that statement.

BEAR-GRASS YUCCA

Native Americans have long used Bear-grass for a variety of purposes. Leaves were used for basket weaving, leaf fibers for clothing, and rhizomes roasted for food. Eastern prairie tribes boiled the roots for a hair tonic and the treatment for sprains. Elk and deer forage on the flower stalks.

PRAIRIE SAGE

Prairie Sage has a rich history of utilization by Native American tribes. Uses range from preservatives for meat, horse feed, insect repellent (through the burning of the plant), medicinal decoctions to alleviate toothache, headache, coughing, lung ailments, heartburn, and as a cold remedy.

Opps! I need another “i” in Prairie Sage! ;-)

The Prairie Sage plate getting ready to become a Palladium Platinum print!

The Bear-Grass Yucca on a Palladium Platinum sensitized paper - this is HPR paper. I think this is my favorite paper for this process.

The Prairie Sage negative right after fixing.

Bra-Grass Yucca - digital snap.

The Prickly Pear Cactus

I see the flora portion of this work taking shape. I work on it about 30 hours a week. Not including research and reading. It’s the best “job” I’ve ever had.

There’s still a lot to do. The weather is so nice here, I struggle between working in the studio and getting out to do so more remote work. I worry about making images on Tava-Kaavi - Sun Mountain (the colonized name is Pikes Peak) or at the Garden of the Gods. I’m not interested in the “chocolate box” photographs. In fact, I’ve had a lot of success staying right here in my backyard so to speak. It’s difficult for me to do "traditional” work. I’ve said it a thousand times, I’m not interested in the standard landscape image. They bore me to death - so tiresome. I need to resolve these issues and making plates is how I resolve the problem. All in time!

A digital snap of the cactus.

The Making of the Foxtail Barley Plate

THURSDAY JULY 7, 2022
Life is good on the mountain. I was in the studio early today. The light is so beautiful in the early morning here. I have a 10’ x 10’ (3 x 3m) window that faces north. I use that opening to make these flora images.

I was in the mood to listen to something interesting and powerful. Jeanne and I just re-watched “Smoke Signals” (a great film) and Robbie Robertson had a song in it. It reminded me that 30 years ago, we picked up his album, “Music for the Native Americans” (Coyote Dance linked below). So I started playing that as I prepared some glass for making negatives.

"Dispossessed, of their ancestral homelands by successive invasions of Europeans, the first real Americans have long been cloaked in a veil of myth and legend that has hidden from us the true richness and diversity of Indian civilizations and cultures. This newly unfolding legacy represents an unparalleled body of untapped wisdom, which even now provides fresh perspectives on very modern problems. The astonishing reality of Indian history, presented here for the first time from the perspective of native Americans, will deepen our understanding of what it really means to be an American. The archaeological history of the native peoples of the Americas goes back more than 30,000 years. By the time Columbus landed in this "New" World, it was a very old world that already had seen entire civilizations rise and fall through the centuries. These linked continents were by then populated by some 75,000,000 people who spoke 2,000 distinct languages and had developed a rich diversity of separate cultures, all joined in trade by a venerable network that covered the entire northern continent. Here, in a fresh look at the Americas, is a view of this "new" world's magnificent sweep of history through the eyes of its original inhabitants. It is an inspiring story of their amazing adaptability to a challenging land, especially in the past five hundred years when native Americans were forced to cope with the introduction into their environment of the most rapacious predator they had ever faced: white European invaders. Spanning a thousand generations, from the time Ice Age man first set foot on this continent to the present, and beautifully written by five well-known authorities on Indian history and culture, this volume is lavishly illustrated with photographs, maps, and, the work of both historic and contemporary artists."--Publisher's description.

I remembered a book we picked up around that same time. It’s called, “The Native Americans An Illustrated History”. I grabbed it out of my library and opened it up. The first thing I saw was this paper with my handwriting on it.

I really like the second paragraph, it said,

“What do we do with this history? I say we embrace it, study it, wrestle with it and transform it into a weapon for the human spirit, one that will enlarge our sense of empathy, and responsibility, alleviate human suffering and strengthen our moral resolve.”

I opened the book and saw this writing from almost 30 years ago.

It was like I was meant to see this almost 30 years later working on this project now. It’s powerful to me. I’m glad I wrote the words down. I have no idea where they came from but I know these issues have been on my mind for a long time.

CONCEPT OF THE WORK?
How do you approach a body of work? What considerations do you make? I’ve recently been writing a lot about how to make this project authentic while still making it accessible and interesting. Sometimes, if we’re not careful, we can get too deep into the “weeds” and lose people. In other words, it’s important we translate the esoteric stuff into plain, understandable language. I’ve always said that I need to explain my intentions so that an elementary school student can understand them. At the very least, the basic concepts of the work. I’m trying to work that portion out now about this work.

BEAUTY AND TRAGEDY - GOOD AND EVIL
So, what are my intentions? I would start by saying that my primary intention is to keep the history, the people, and the events present and alive. Always be aware that there were people here for thousands of years before the colonizers. They were slaughtered and removed from this land. This needs to be in the consciousness of the viewers. And equally, I want to esteem the Ute/Tabegauche peoples, their land, their plants, and their wildlife. They are here, alive and living their lives. My goal is to make beautiful and interesting work that accomplishes both of these objectives. It’s a battle of beauty and tragedy. Good and evil. Those are the ideas that I want the narrative to ride on.

I recently had a long conversation with a friend who happens to be a native and an artist/educator. I reached out to him because I was concerned about my approach to this work and wanted to hear his perspective. It was a valuable conversation. He gave me a lot of good advice. And I was happy to hear that he thought it was good that I was making the work. My big takeaway from the conversation was to try to involve the Tabegauche members in some way. I’m not sure what that will be, but I'll try to make it happen. I’m going to contact the Ute Indian Museum and try to start a dialogue about what I’m doing.

I’m always cautious about treading in territory that I shouldn’t be in - making work that I have no business making. I feel that we’ve (the United States) done enough damage. We’ve caused tremendous suffering and created loss beyond comprehension. I don’t need to appropriate their culture and give romantic views of “the Indians”.

I still struggle with white men exploiting indigenous people through “art”. I struggle with living on indigenous, stolen land, too. I’m very aware of my privilege that way. I know what’s been done and I know it’s over and there’s nothing we can do to change the past. However, I don’t want to be part of the continual exploitation of indigenous peoples or any people. I want to be an asset, not a liability in this context. I’m very aware of who I am and what I’m doing. That’s why I constantly examine myself. I’m a big believer in the Socratic method. Critical thinking and being aware, or conscious of the context in which you are working is very important. This type of work carries a lot of baggage, there’s a long history that needs unpacking when we address these issues. It’s not simply looking at images and saying if you like them or not.

WHERE DOES THE ART HAPPEN?
Where does the art happen? I’ve had a somewhat unique, or maybe different, perspective on this question for a while. I feel like the photographs, or whatever media, are kind of a residue or leftover of when the art happened. In other words, when I’m making the image, that’s where the art happens. The connection, the emotions, the thoughts, the feelings, all of it in that moment is THE ART! The negatives and prints are the evidence of that experience. In the end, the prints are important, but they are only records of ideas and emotions. They help us understand the bigger picture (no pun intended).

DETAIL - “Foxtail Barley” - American Indian tribes had several uses for foxtail barley. The dried and moistened root was applied as a compress for eye inflammation and the seeds were pounded into a meal and eaten.
Palladium Platinum print on HPR paper from a whole plate wet collodion negative.

DOES ART HAVE A PURPOSE?
I would encourage you to think about how you approach work. What considerations do you make and why? There’s no question I could simply make “chocolate box” pictures, print them and show them and sell them. That would be simple and a lot easier to do. I’m not considering that approach at all. I really don’t have any commercial concerns. At the end of the day, my biggest concern is making work that embodies the ideas I’ve laid out with the hope that some viewers “get it” and it will have some kind of impact. Just being aware of these things is half of the battle. If art can do that, it’s done its job.

"In the 21st Century, photography is not a stale sight for sore eyes, but the inquiry into what makes something an image. As such, photography is the most essential task of art in the current time."
- Dr. Daniel Rubinstein is the course leader of MA Photography at Central Saint Martins and editor of the Journal Philosophy of Photography.

Notice the purple tops on the barley? They translate bright in collodion.