The first suggestion my therapist had when I started therapy a few years ago was to get off my phone. Stop looking at social media! Unplug! Focus on other things! I had been spending far too much time making comparisons between my life and total strangers who were nothing like me, and it was starting to go to my head (clearly). She made a valid point of course, but frankly the suggestion to cut out online presence completely felt a little overly idealistic. Who can afford to unplug anymore?
In the months since I’ve tried to take her advice. Sometimes I’m more successful than others. It can be really hard to pull yourself away from the interconnected online world, and even harder to actually slow down to non-cyberspeed pace once you do. Sometimes it requires a little extra push, and little did I know that I would have one of those come my way this semester.
In the old days, people had nothing to do, so they made art!
These are the words of my photography professor, who is currently teaching us a curriculum all about historic photo processes—my chosen photo course of the semester. Basically, these are ways that people made photographic art long before digital cameras or phones that can take hundreds of photos in a matter of minutes. Each of these processes is slow and patient in its own way, reflecting the slower lifestyles of the people that invented them 200+ years ago. They usually involve coating the paper yourself—in some chemicals that make it reactive to UV light—and then washing it, and then dipping it in some more chemical, and then washing it some more.
Let me take you along for the experience:
Oftentimes in class, we’ll start creating photos by exposing our coated paper to the sun…
This usually takes anywhere from 5-40 minutes, and doesn’t involve much other than sitting on the ground in a sunspot and watching the emulsion on the paper change color so slowly you aren’t even sure whether you’re actually seeing it or your eyes are just playing tricks on you. I could’ve gone inside during this, sure—back to the demanding presence of my laptop and Gmail inbox. Usually though, I found myself just sitting in the sun and watching the not-so-busy happenings of Murphy Hall on a Friday afternoon. Bonus points if there was a good breeze. In one eventful class (in which our attempts at exposing actually turned out to be a massive failure), we ended up putting all of our prints out next to each other, sitting in a circle, and just talking and enjoying the nice weather. I think I preferred this tenfold to sitting in a dim classroom with no windows while staring at a screen.
After this we wash the chemical out of the paper. Once again this can take about 5-30 minutes. And then even after that the photos have to line dry for however long they need to.
Some of the processes in the class have even involved the use of the photography darkroom, which is commonly considered among photographers to be a much more slow and tactile process. It’s not simply a matter of printing a digital image off of photoshop and, due to the light sensitivity, it isn’t physically possible to have your phone out during the process. There simply isn’t anything else to do other than agitate the photochemical and watch the second hand glide around the clock until it’s time for the print to come out.
The class chuckled at the beginning of the semester when our professor joked about people being bored and spending their days watching images appear on paper—but the further into the class I get the more I see her point. In the present day when everyone seems to have a hard enough time escaping the grips of social media and online work, something as simple as sitting in the sunshine and doing nothing but wait for a while is an experience that’s hard to come by.
Plus, the end result is usually a lot cooler than that of my hour-long mindless social media scroll.
The alternative processes depicted in this article’s photographs include Cyanotype and Van Dyke Brown printing methods. The featured image features a full scale Van Dyke Brown print using Ortho Litho film.
