November 2024

Geometric shapes were cut out from sheets of coloured construction paper, adhered to 8x10 sheets of sketch paper, and then inkjet printed and scanned.

Images from Ile St. Helene, the former Expo 67 site, trial prints.

Boy, I have been busy lately, but I am happy I could find time to write today’s newsletter and share some new work with you all as we move into December and into the dark, cold days of the Canadian winter months (for me, at least).

Since owning a camera and taking the medium seriously, winter has never been a season I have photographed particularly well. Instead, it was a season I spent trying to take photos inside or, more honestly, playing guitar instead of playing around with a camera.

The only difference this year is that I now have a new photo printer and a scanner, which I have been enjoying while experimenting with ideas backlogged in my mind about what I can do with different materials and an inkjet printer.

I am also hoping to start wet printing by the end of winter 2025 by making digital negatives to contact print on silver gelatin paper in my bathroom, a la Edward Weston, with nothing but a bare bulb and a sheet of glass or a contact printing frame if I can find one for a reasonable price.

I’m not sure where the saying “it’s not a photograph until it is printed” comes from, but I won’t argue its merit. Especially now that I have access to making quality prints at home, it has greatly changed how I see the final result of an image far removed from the file/negative.

Masking tape print lifts are inspired by Polaroid emulsion lifts. Patterns are made with standard masking tape on 5x7 sheets of sketch paper and then inkjet printed. After printing, the masking tape is lifted and transferred to another 5x7 sketch paper, creating a "positive” and a “negative” image (I prefer the “positives”).

Now, don’t get me wrong, I absolutely adore a good quality print made with the best possible materials and being the best possible rendition of the original image, but I am also madly in love with the idea of using the basic, everyday materials one finds at the Dollar Store, Walmart, the local business depot (sketching paper, graph paper, cardstock, construction paper, printing paper), or in upcycling scenarios like what I am doing with packing materials sourced from my job site to create prints as well.

I am also very curious about collage, texture, surface, layering, and physical manipulation of photographic prints, as well as what can be done with a scanner to bring things together and reproduce them as prints.

To get the nerdy gear bits out of the way for those who might be interested, I opted to upgrade to a Canon G620 Mega Tank photo printer as, according to Canon’s website, this printer is supposed to be capable of producing 3,800 4x6 inch prints on one set of inks and for someone like me who needs to make a lot of tests to get things right or to make happy discoveries along the way, having a printer with a high yield and low cost was essential.

If I were to start buying my favourite Canon matte paper in bulk by the roll (which I plan to) with a fresh set of inks being very cost-friendly, I do believe my calculations were at about $0.08 a print (4x6 inches, that is, a preferred size of mine anyway). So, for my usage needs, this printer made total sense, and at $400 Canadian, it fit my modest budget for an upgrade from a $50 Canon office printer.

The scanner I bought is also a budget-friendly option: the Epson V39II costs $100 Canadian and does what I need it to do. If I were scanning film negatives, I wouldn’t be happy with this scanner, but since I am scanning prints, it does a fine job now.

“Sides as the center” came to me as an idea after talking with a friend who photographs predominantly 6x6 frames with a TLR camera and remarked on my Holden, MO pictures that sometimes he feels like he is lacking the breadth of a classic 35mm (3:2 aspect ratio) frame so I took a few of my Holden photos, printed them, then cut the right and left sides off and reassembled them as a square image leaving the center of the frame a square image as well to see if the photos would be “lacking” anything and how would the sides of the image communicate together as a new composition.

These two tools (the printer and the scanner) have opened up many questions about what a photograph can become once reimagined as a print.

Does the print remain a faithful reproduction of what I see on my screen transferred to a new surface? What surface then best highlights the photograph? Does the picture become manipulated through cutting, rearranging, distorting, layering, lifting, painting, drawing, scratching, toning, and scanning to be reproduced again as a print?

Will a print be a precious thing or something to be celebrated for its impermanence due to “cheap” materials? I desire to get started with wet printing to become aware of the print as a precious item, something to endure, something to outlast me, if not for nothing but the notion of the craft of making a long-lasting “thing.”

Yet we are impermanent beings living on a finite planet at the most cheaply fabricated consumer-driven point in history. I feel a strong urge to confront, question, and make from this state and the materials it uses. We are all a part of this global consumer culture, whether we would like to admit to it or not, and rather than point fingers, I like the idea of pushing the questions I ask myself in my pictures further by thinking of ways to use materials to add layers to these questions, layers of distortion that are true to the reality we occupy.

Test prints exploring the idea of plastic in consumer culture. Working in a warehouse, I see a lot of waste and ridiculous forms of overkill, such as individual items being wrapped in cheap “protective” plastic. I began collecting different types of plastic wrap to use as a surface for prints. I have much more to experiment with, but these initial results are promising. The prints are made with chipboard collected from work with the plastic layer placed overtop and then scanned.

The idea of collaging or rearranging elements found within a single image and then seeing how that reacts with other visual elements has always interested me. Since I understand a knife and a ruler better than I’ll ever understand the tools in Photoshop, being able to print, manipulate, and scan these ideas and playfulness feels liberating to me.

I have boxes of 4x6-inch prints I have made over the years from your usual suspects like pharmacies, Walmart, and the like that I have been using as source materials to try ideas with. I then apply the successful ideas (or note them down) to replicate later or, more importantly, to make new work with those ideas in mind.

Just like making pictures should rely on intuition before clouding things up with concepts and concrete ideas, printmaking is the same (at least for me) where right now, things are relying heavily on play to find new and interesting things that can be applied practically and theoretically later on to old or new work as it applies.

If you can’t tell already, this winter will be filled with coffee and ink, and I am very excited to see what I find that can be applied to new work in the spring/summer/fall months of 2025.

4x6 inch prints from Walmart with the top and bottom 1.5 inches removed, reassembled next to the center, repeated three times to create an approximate 8x10 print and then scanned.

Outside of print mania, I attended ExpoZine 2025 at the end of November to promote my work, but more importantly, to launch Urban Avalon Press into the world with our debut title, “Call & Response,” which is currently sold out.

Call & Response

Still, if you are in the Toronto area or the UK, you can grab a copy once I have settled and shipped copies to two photo book stores that have graciously agreed to carry the title. I will have more information on when and where that will be in the new year.

ExpoZine left me socially drained even though it was a great experience (my social battery is pretty weak, and it took over a week to bounce back from the event). Still, I want to thank everyone who came by to support the launch and everyone who met with Dean (the other photographer featured in “Call & Response”) for supporting him and his work!

I will be starting a short winter course on the photo book with Tim Carpenter next week (I have been putting together a new PDF of “The Divided Heart” for class), which I was able to afford thanks to your support in buying zines from me recently, which is simply fantastic. I can’t thank you all enough for the support.

My goal for this class is to walk away with the final version of this project in book form to be either picked up by a publisher or self-published down the road if I can afford it, or perhaps I’ll consider crowdfunding it through presales.

Four multiple-exposure images were printed on sketch paper and reassembled to create one square image.

I think I have done more talking than needed (but if you have been following along for a while now, you know I like to type), so we will end today’s newsletter with another big thank you to all of you for caring enough to read my words and for those of you who can afford it for buying my zines lately.

Canada Post is still on strike, so I haven’t been able to fulfill past purchases yet and will not be making anything available until the strike is over. I fully support the workers and the strike, and I hope the union gets a deal that reflects what the workers are looking for. Still, I apologize for the inconvenience some of you are experiencing while waiting for your packages to be shipped.

This year I amassed a good amount of new books and zines from doing swaps with other photographers, so I will try my best to make a few posts celebrating my favourite books of 2024 and the work of people with who I tarded zines with.

Take care, everyone, and I’ll see you at the next installment!

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