Alternative Photography and Digital Techniques

Higgins Gallery/Cape Cod Community College

I shoot mainly with an iPhone camera and use Adobe Photoshop and a limited number of apps to reflect my particular artistic sensibilities and understanding of the history of photography. I want my images to have a strong tactile quality either from the digital files or from textured substrates. Photographic transfers and the painterly surface effects of monotype printmaking are the kinds of hybrid art I find most compelling.

Street Art NYC is a photographic series of torn and weathered images, peeling layers of information, spray-painted graffiti, and marker messages. My digital images are printed on DASS™ film (a special transfer material). Archival pigment inks are transferred to Yupo paper. An alternate technique is to make a monotype—using a gel plate and gold acrylic paint—and to transfer print taped strips of DASS™ film over them—creating posters of my own.

Notes: I began making  the larger prints on Yupo paper, a recyclable, waterproof, tree-free synthetic paper. Because I wanted to fit my images to pre-cut mats, I wasted quite a few sheets of DASS™ film trying to get  perfect image sizes. I used WonderSauce™ transfer medium for these first prints. There was some "lift off", but it seemed well-matched to the subject matter. During the time I was working on this project,  I took a monotype printing-making class with Joyce Zavorskas. We used oil-based inks and large studio presses to print on BFKRives paper.  At home in my small studio space, I found an alternative method— making simple monotypes with Gelli® plates and acrylic paints. I cut up strips and pieces of the "reject" DASS™ film to make collages and printed them over gold monotypes using both WonderSauce™ and SuperSauce™ as  transfer media...plenty of happy accidents and  downright mess-ups! Tip: Spraying between layers with workable fixatif  prevents too much "lift off" from the film.