Three Trees Near Water, Hudson River Valley, ©2008

Late in 2007 I was feeling antsy after a long binge of inkjet printing. I'd just finished a color project that was presented strictly as larger inkjet prints. The project was rewarding and the prints looked great but a change-of-gears was definitely in order. Hankering to get back into the darkroom, I also felt a nagging desire to take the handmade print in a different direction. For one, I wanted to counter photography's current trend toward "gigantism," in which every photographer with a spare $4,500 feels compelled to make huge photographs. The solution: make miniature prints, in the order of 4"x6". Secondly, I really wanted to make prints that didn't look like anything made with an inkjet printer, here again to buck the "can you make an inkjet print that looks like (fill in the blank)?" So just where did these two very different goals lead me photographically?

With a quarter century of platinum/palladium printing under my belt, I began to explore ways to combine yet another precious metal-gold, as it turns out-with the handcoated platinum/palladium print. Gold has a proud history in photography, having been used in toners and even as dust suspended in banana oil (behind glass positives) by Edward Curtis. Not wanting to reinvent the wheel, I started an exploration that culminated in a body of Platinum/Palladium over Gold Leaf on Vellum prints.