Indochine. Levinthal, exploration and alternative processes.

Indochine - Cyanotype print

Early last year I mentioned how I admired the work of David Levinthal one of my posts. I like the way he creates elaborate sets using toys and miniatures then, with careful consideration to space and lighting creates drama, tension and narrative. Often, as in his Modern Romance 1984 -86 series, the images have a certain voyeuristic quality and the viewer can easily forget that they're actually looking at models, not real people or events. 

Indochine - Cyanotype print

Like Levinthal, much of my work often has a certain voyeuristic quality, I like looking but don't always engage or interact with my subjects as much as I could. Travel forms a large part of my life and this disengaged state of mind is often compounded by language and cultural barriers. My travel photos are often a combination of voyeurism and nostalgia. I like history and and am fascinated by stories of exploration and discovery. For me, there is a romance to travel which doesn't often exist when I am actually 'on the road' and preoccupied with the minutiae of changing money, finding a bed for the night or a toilet in a hurry. 

Indochine - Cyanotype print

 So, inspired by Levinthal and old travel postcards I set about creating a series of images for a series entitled Indochine. Using model figures, predominantly from a Hong Kong based company called King & Country and sets which I built out of cardboard, foam core and things I found in aquarium suppliers (the Bayon 'face' sculpture) or lying around the house I have constructed my own tale of exploration, discovery and conquest. It's loosely based on the French expansion into Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia & Laos) but really just me having fun and being a kid again. 

Indochine - Cyanotype print

The series is not quite complete and has evolved somewhat since I first started. Initially all the images were produced as fiber-based, silver gelatin prints, hand coloured to resemble old post cards. But in the past few weeks, with one of my classes at college experimenting with alternative printing techniques, I decided to re work them and produce the series as Cyanotype prints. The Cyanotype process was invented by the British astronomer Sir John Herschel in 1842 and has remained largely unchanged since. It uses two iron compounds, ferric ammonium citrate (green) and potassium ferricyanide, which when combined becomes sensitive to UV light. The images you can see here use this original recipe, coated onto water colour paper and using the contact printing method exposed to bright sunlight to create the print. Once exposure (which takes around 15 minutes for the negative material I am using) is complete, running water removes the unexposed emulsion leaving a rich blue image... hence the term cyanotype. I'm not a huge fan of the blue print, so have partially bleached these with household grade ammonia and then toned the print in a strong solution of tea resulting in the duo tone look that you can see here.

Indochine - Cyanotype print

Anyway, hope that you like what I've come up so far, I'll post more as I complete them.

Be cool

Killing time with Goya and Levinthal

The Charge of the Light Brigade

© Julian Tennant - Polaroid Spectra, Artists Proof print

I took this Polaroid earlier in the week. The end result of procrastination and my usual attempts to avoid doing any meaningful work. I should have been doing prep for my classes at TAFE, but as usual I became distracted. At least it wasn't porn this time. I was looking at some of Francisco Goya's  Disasters of War and Otto Dix's Der Krieg prints. Disturbing stuff ... powerful images that convey to me, the same level of horror, pitiful waste and sadness as much of the hardcore war photography that came out of the latter half of the twentieth century.

And as I meandered through the net looking at pix and thinking about stuff I rediscovered David Levinthal, a photographer whose style has been defined through his use of elaborate miniature sets to explore concepts and ideas. Probably best known for his Hitler Moves East series, I found his Mein Kampf body of work to be quite powerful in how it caused me to respond to what are essentially pictures of toys. He uses models paying careful attention to light, composition and depth of field control to create  scenes of drama, tension and narrative. In his photographs, the harmless children’s toys’ that society uses to socialise it’s young take on much darker connotations as he addresses issues in his personal life and the world around him.

Inspired by his work and with the prints of Goya and Dix fresh in my head, I dragged out my beloved Minolta Spectra Pro which still has one of my last remaining (and long expired) packs of Polaroid film sitting in it's belly. The figures are some models that I have from the Hong Kong based company King & Country, not quite relics of my childhood and... well, this is my feeble attempt anyway.