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!
Banning State Park, July 2022, (Fomapan 100 film, Hasselblad 501c/m camera, Xtol Developer)Banning State Park, July 2022, (Fomapan 100 film, Hasselblad 501c/m camera, Xtol Developer)Banning State Park, July 2022, (Fomapan 100 film, Hasselblad 501c/m camera, Xtol Developer)Banning State Park, July 2022, (Fomapan 100 film, Hasselblad 501c/m camera, Xtol Developer)Banning State Park, July 2022, (Kodak Ektar film, Hasselblad 501c/m camera, ECN2 developer)Banning State Park, July 2022, Compilation imageBanning State Park, July 2022, Compilation image
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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.
In spring of 2018, after a winter of feeling stuck and a bit uninspired, I decided to create a photo assignment for myself to jump start my creativity. Years past I had done photo class assignments of photographing the same location multiple times over the course of a year and had enjoyed the idea. I decided to start there.
I needed to challenge myself to be alone…
I often hike and photograph with other people around. And I love this. But I felt it was time to try heading out on my own and see if it changed how I worked and thought about photographing. It was also a good challenge for me personally to spend a little more time with myself.
I started with my favorite locations….
I love Lake Superior. I grew up with regular road trips to its shores, and it remained a special place to me. Those familiar start parks and hikes seemed like the perfect place to return to regularly.
I set my timeline…
I wanted to be able to see the changes from one season to the next, the change in weather, and of course the changes in the lake. I decided that I would drive north to photograph once per month. I knew that I would be able to fit the trip into one day and not worry about staying somewhere over night. Going once a month would give me the flexibility to adjust dates according to weather and road conditions as well.
I picked my locations….
Four locations seemed like a great place to start, and allowed me to visit some of my favorites: Canal Park, Brighton Beach, Gooseberry Falls, and Tettegouche State Park. Tettegouche has long been one of my favorite places to sit and watch the lake. This was the furthest north I wanted to go, knowing I would still be able to make it there to photograph with adequate light during the short days of winter.
The technical choices:
I decided to go back to basics and photograph these locations with black and white film. This would also make it easy for me to develop the film myself. To make organizing negatives easier for myself, I decided to devote one roll of medium format film to each location. And of course, I would be taking my favorite camera, a Hasselblad 501 c/m with me.
I didn’t know what the end result would be…
I started out with this project mostly being a personal challenge to myself. I didn’t know what I would do with all of these images in the end. The main focus was on collecting them, getting myself into a creative habit again, and learning a bit about myself. Honestly, proving to myself that I could hike alone with my camera equipment and not die or get stuck somewhere like a helpless turtle was a big part of this.
And then….
About 1/2 way through this year long project, a photo friend asked to come with me. And through a days long conversation with her, it came to me that these images were meant to be layers. That they were meant to be part of a larger image, an image that showed what a year in that location was like. These images would show the ethereal nature of the passage of time. Everything clicked together.
After taking photos for a year, I started to work on the final images…
It was a long process figuring out on the first few locations how to layer all of these images together, what Photoshop settings to use: filters, opacity, image density, and lining up parts of the landscape. Once these details were worked out, my progress on the final images took off at a fevered pitch.
I realized that I didn’t want to stop with Lake Superior…
So I continued this project. In 2020-2021 I photographed 6 locations along the Mississippi River. This was started just after the stay-at-home orders were lifted, as my city was reacting to the murder of George Floyd. When I picked these locations, I didn’t know how much it would mean to me to be near by to home and my city during this year.
In July 2021 I started photographing Lake Mille Lacs. I am stopping at only 3 locations this time. The 6 locations along the Mississippi ended up being logistically draining with developing and scanning time. I wanted to take it a bit easier this time around. It has been fascinating watching the water and area around the lake change with the seasons.
Where to next?
I don’t know! If you have an idea of what Minnesota body of water I should photograph next, let me know in the comments!
Perhaps the best place to start is to introduce myself and my project…
I am a photographer…
I am a photographer, documenting the memories of our landscapes. I photograph what we leave behind on this earth, what appears, what disappears, and what remains. Using my camera I document our fragile home, witness the changes, and attempt to tell her story.
“Water is mutable, flexible, adaptive, and persistent. It holds memory and structure. Water’s structure allows it to work together as a unified system.” – Edgar Fabian Frias.
Much of my artwork focuses on water.
Our bodies of water hold the memory of the space they occupy, how that space has changed over the centuries, and how the surroundings have changed. Our water bodies hold the memory of our footprints on this earth, the memories of centuries of inhabitants within and without. Often at the center of very politically charged battles for usage rights and fossil fuels, our bodies of water are sources of life.
Photographing, documenting, and telling the stories of Minnesota’s bodies of water is an ongoing project for me.
This project began by documenting a year of Lake Superior’s memories. These photographs were taken with medium format film from the same vantage points at four locations along the north shore. I photographed each location once per month from May 2018 through May 2019. To create the final images, I layer these photographs on top of one another.
Through this process I create a compilation image of one full year of memories of that water and land.
The final images have an eerie and ghostly quality to them, at once showing a brief moment in the lifespan of the water, and hinting at what may be yet to come.
Lake Superior was only the beginning.
From May 2020 through May 2021 I photographed a year of a portion of the Mississippi River. Like with the Lake Superior project, I identified six locations between South St. Paul and Elk River, and photographed these locations once per month. I completed photographing May 2021 and am currently creating the compilation images of these places. Last summer I began photographing Mille Lacs Lake in the same way, and will complete photographing the lake in July 2022.
The grant project…
I just received a Minnesota State Arts Board Creative Support Grant to continue work on this project. I will collect these photographs and compilations and form them into a series of hand bound artist books, documenting each location and it’s story. Books are accessible, intimate, and give the viewer a tactile connection with the work. They can be shown in a variety of settings. Most of all, they must be held and touched by the viewer for the full experience. This gives the viewer a more intimate, tactile connection with the work. The grant period runs from January 2022-December 2022. During that time I will be hosting a variety of virtual events showcasing the creation of the books and discussions of our local bodies of water, their meanings for our people and neighborhoods, their importance to our climate. These virtual events will be recorded when possible and shared in this space as well.
I hope you will follow along on this journey.
I will be sharing many looks behind the scenes, and sharing bits of my artistic process. I hope you join me, I hope you ask questions, and I hope this makes you think a bit differently about the bodies of water near you.
Thursday I went in to the studio before my work shift started, intent on making one large plate. Maybe a print too, but for sure a plate.
I cleaned the plate maker, clean glass, new transparency.
Deep breath.
Light coating of baby powder on the plate and giving the vacuum table time to run and settle before flipping it over for exposure.
62 light units for the aquatint screen.
3.7 light units for the image.
One of the students followed me into the darkroom to watch the plate develop.
15 seconds of just water swishing. 40 seconds of brush washing. Blotted dry with smooth newsprint.
“I’m so excited!!”, the student watching said.
Yeah, me too.
I dried the plate. Time for post exposure. This time I taped it to the outside of the glass so nothing could stick to it.
“Are you going to print it!?”, I’m asked. Looking at the clock, I have just enough time.
I ink it, and pull one print before I am scheduled to work.
It is the best print I have gotten since starting this project with this medium and this plate burner. No, it isn’t perfect, there are areas I want to tweak, and make a new transparency and a new plate and try again. But this is the first that doesn’t have the spots, the splotchy-ness, the fuzzy edges, the uneven exposure. I know the steps, I know what I have to do. Now I just need to work on the images.
There was a lot of testing done. And over the last two weeks I have spent a lot of time with this little machine.
After spending many hours one Sunday making test strips out of polymer plates, I knew I was close with the exposure times.
Results like this kept me going. Not perfect, but better. I started testing plates that were just a little larger. I know that this series will have layered images. But I was uncertain how that would translate to this medium. I realized there were two approaches I could use. 1. To make the layered image in Photoshop and print a transparency with them layered like I want, and make a plate from that. Though I figured that would be challenging due to the fact that layering images in Photoshop can make some areas very dense, making a difficult image to make a plate from. Option 2. would be to split up the two images, make a separate transparency and separate plate of each and do the image layering on the press. I knew this would be a challenge to get the images to blend together smoothly, and registration of plates so they lined up during printing could be a night mare.
I started playing with images, and trying both ideas. It also gave me a chance to play with ink tones and colors a bit. Everything was helping, and getting me closer to what I wanted. I could see that. But nothing was “it”. The exposures were decent, but the images were fuzzy, and spotty. I started doing more research through blogs to troubleshoot what was happening.
Once I had learned more about what could be going wrong, and after a pretty rough week, I decided to try one more plate. I was somewhat confident that I knew what was happening, that my aquatint screen and my image transparency were not making good enough contact, due in part to the fact that I was using a smaller plate to test, but not necessarily using a smaller screen or image. I was trying to save money in plate material to test, but it wasn’t necessarily giving me proper tests.
So I took a deep breath, and jumped in. Stay tuned for how that turned out!
