I have been hooked to photography – black and white in particular – as a hobby since as a child in the 1970’s I stood and watched my grandfather (a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society) in his darkroom developing his black and white photographs – the mesmerising process of developing film and prints and the magic of the emerging image in the developing tray. I no longer have access to a darkroom – and the advent of digital photography and high quality inkjet printing has for most of us rendered the darkroom obsolete. However something of the romance of the analogue photographic process has been lost – the ease with which it is possible to capture high quality images, and turn these into stunning black and white images even on your phone – a process which in the analogue era was painstaking precision work – has democratised but cheapened the photographic image. We now all have millions of digitised images sitting on phones, on hard drives and in the cloud – the vast majority of which serve their purpose for a few seconds and are then never looked at again.
So for some time I had been looking for a way to both recreate the romance of analogue photography and also turn my photography back into the art form that I believe it can be. It was about two years ago that I came across the fascinating process of polymer photogravure. Finally I have found a process that justifies choosing just one image out of the thousands of images I have and subjecting it to a process to turn it into something that persists and becomes a thing, an object or even a work of art. I have described the process here – and it is one that I am still learning – but I am now enjoying my photography again in way that I haven’t experienced since my childhood.