Member-only story
Playing with Light
A few weeks ago my partner and I went for a little break, our first getaway of any kind in a long time. We stayed on a retired Bluebird school bus in the middle of nowhere in Devon. We had absolutely nothing to do except for make food and mooch around with the dog. Lovely.
In the couple of months prior to this I had been teaching a module on the art degree called ‘Sustainable Practice’ for which I had been running some alternative photography workshops. We played around with ways of using traditional photographic processes but bypassing the use of photographic chemistry which is a terrible pollutant and pretty horrific for the environment.
After making some 5x4 paper negatives, we developed using caffenol — a recipe I stole from the internet made up of two thirds of a jar of instant coffee, some vitamin c tablets and soda crystals — and attempted to fix using salt water.
Incredibly, I had never done this before either, after 20 years of playing around in the darkroom I have only ever used traditional chemicals. I was delighted that these simple alternatives worked so well, even toning the negative and resulting contact prints. It is of course a flawed process, but I can imagine a little more…
