Jes Lee

Banning State Park

I am anxiously waiting to be able to go hiking at the state parks again. I am much more stable walking, and almost back to the distances I was previously able to hike. We have a list of parks to get to this spring and summer, and I am already stocking up on film to take. 

In the mean time, I thought I would share some of the images I made last year while we were out camping and hiking. 

These images also tie into my water project. While I won’t go back to these places every month for a whole year, I want to document the time I did spend there, and count them in the overall project.

Next month I plan to get back to regular photographing for my year long water project, and I am so looking forward to days of taking photos and developing film again.

Thanks for being here!
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Printing

I will be sharing with you more of the process of making the books for my series A Year Long Portrait of Water. As I am nearing the end of the first stage of this project, I want to document the processes I have been using to make these books.

First I will share a bit about the printing process. Below is a video I made last fall, after printing images for this book in my studio all summer long.

There are three types of images included in each book. The cover includes a silver gelatin darkroom print. The final images are ink jet prints of the compilation photos created from each year of photographs. And in between are photopolymer photogravure prints of images taken during that year. Photopolymer photogravure is a process of hand printing photo images using hard, light sensitive, plastic plates that are hand inked. This is a process I have been working in for many years now. I am far from perfecting it…I don’t think I ever will…but that is part of the magic for me.

After taking another long break from updating this blog, I hope to come here a lot more often with updates on this project, process posts, and a few other things thrown in. If there is something special you would like to see, please let me know in the comments. Thank you for reading!

Jes Lee is a fiscal year 2022 recipient of a Creative Support for Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.