Hey guys! Man, it’s been a crazy summer, and I am finally able to sit down and write a new post on my personal blog. As you may know, I spent the summer rephotographing Route 66, for my thesis project entitled Mother Road Revisited (if you haven’t gotten to look at the website, check it out). Anyway, in other news, I bought a 6 x 9 letterpress, more on that in my next post. But, a few weeks before I left for my adventure down Route 66, we moved into our new studios in downtown Tulsa. I took some photos before my semester critiques (which is when my studio is it’s cleanest.) So I thought I’d post them:
This is shot from where I placed my desk. My studio is the only one with a brick wall like this. Our building is a refurbished building that is required to have some of the original structure in it. Thus, this brick wall, but I love it. I also have North facing windows, so I have beautiful light at all times, except at night, obviously.
This is shot from where the couch is, all of the studios have these great sinks, I can actually do some version of a darkroom with this sink. I have been working with gum bichromate a lot lately, which is a water based process, so the sink is perfect for it. You can see at the end of the room, on the wall the beginnings of my ‘Alter Ego’ project, those two images star two of my favorite models, Kyle Blair and Sean Terska.
I started messing with the idea of screenprinting illustrations over my photography, so I came up with this collaboration with Jeremiah Christie, from Hovertank Diaries and John Spriggs, from Jeb Kennedy. Jeremiah wrote stories about each photo, while John did illustrations about the stories. The stories are printed on a Japanese paper behind the photo, while the illustration is screen printed on top of the photo. I then waxed the photos, so they became more translucent. They don’t photograph all that well, you can kind of see the words behind the photo on the bottle image in the top right. But I would like to back light them at some point.
You can see here the gum bichromates I’ve been doing. Some of them are actual prints from the darkroom, while others are scanned prints and then digitally printed on Japanese paper…mostly just messing around with my options right now.
This is the wall that is mostly about my Route 66 project. These maps show the route I would took in June from Chicago to LA, with the cities circled that I have postcards for along the way.
Anyway, there’s the studio, and a look into what I have been working on in the last year. Hopefully it will all look a little more complete come April.
Talk to you soon,
Natalie
All In A Days Work: 