Release of Polymer Photogravure book
Over the next few weeks, my new book Polymer Photogravure: A Step-by-Step Manual, Highlighting Artists and Their Creative Practice will start appearing in online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. The book is being published by Routledge Publishing under their Focal Press imprint.
This is the first book I have written, and the process was one that felt huge and overwhelming while I was in the midst of it, but as the months have passed, all the effort involved seems appropriate given what the final product looks like.
This book is part of what is intended to be a comprehensive series of books on alternative process photographic printing techniques. Each book in the series will concentrate on a single process. This series of books is titled Contemporary Practices in Alternative Process Photography.
CurrentlyI have updated this list as of 3-17-2022 , there are 10 series titles available:
- Cyanotype
- Platinotype
- Digital Negatives
- Chrysotype
- Carbon Transfer
- Polymer Photogravure
- Handmade Silver Gelatin
- Salted Paper
- Gum Printing
- Cyanotype Toning
A book on Kallitype and VanDyke Brown is currently being written. Future series books will be develop-out Palladium printing and Wet Plate Collodion.
The common organizational pattern to all the books in the series is that the first half of the book is an in-depth exploration of all the technical aspects of the specific photographic process. The second half of all the books will showcase the artwork from an array of contempory practitioners of the subject printing process. In short: Instruction + Inspiration.
I am very pleased with how my book has turned out. The number of people involved in its creation is humbling. Not only were a host of proof readers and technical reviewers involved, but all of the creators whose work is displayed in the second half of the book had to do a great deal of collection, redaction and explanation of their particular approach to the polymer photogravure process.
One of the strengths of this type of book is that there inevitably is an array of technical approachs and artistic opinions that are represented in the book. Close readers of the book will read my particular approach to the technical part of the process, then move on to the other artist’s writings and discover that there are a multitude of approaches that can yield extraordinary results.
The book is available now on Amazon, and also at Mountain Intaglio, which is a new online store that my spouse Lynn has set up specifically to sell many of the materials needed for this process in smaller, artist-appropriate quantities.