“Over a century ago a nineteen-year-old Vermont farm boy named Wilson Alwyn Bentley began a 46-year love affair with the typology of snow crystals. A century after Bentley, I began a love affair with the historic bleach-etch process and at the same time came upon Bentley’s snow crystal book. Bentley’s beautiful snow crystals swimming in a sea of black were ripe for this bleach-etch process. How was I to make this happen, since these images were not my own?
The bleach-etch process is more difficult to explain than to demonstrate. The process, was initially used to turn film negatives into positives for lantern slide projection. A Frenchman named Jean-Pierre Sudre turned the process into an art form on photographic paper instead of film. Sudre originated the exotic name ‘mordançage’ and ‘bleach-etch’ was lost to history.
In the mordançage process an acid-copper bleaching solution first bleaches and then dissolves a gelatin silver image. It leaves the print in a reverse relief. The dissolving occurs proportionately to the darks—the darker the area, the more dissolution occurs, accompanied by an intriguing raised relief and a beautiful veiling phenomenon. I knew that Bentley’s snow- flake images with their black backgrounds would produce a veiling that would be a fitting visual metaphor for both the floating motion of a snowflake and its ephemeral nature. Since mordançage produces one-of-a-kind prints, how much more fitting to a snow- flake’s uniqueness.”
Christina Z. Anderson is an assistant professor of Photography at Montana State University, Bozeman, where she teaches alternative and experimental process photography. Her two books, The Experimental Photography Workbook, and Alternative Processes, Condensed, have sold around the world. In the works is a comprehensive book on gum bichromate. Her work has been exhibited internationally and nationally in 65 shows and 24 states.
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