The Hepworth Print Fair, Wakefield.

Sunday 5th March saw my wife and myself at the Hepworth Gallery Wakefield for their annual Print Fair which is held in The Calder, a converted canal side Mill next to the main gallery.  The event is worth visiting for the fascinating building itself, but the main event is the wide range of exhibiting print artists. 

I was taken by one contributor in particular:  Alex McIntosh .    Although advertising himself as an artist and printmaker he says that his work is heavily print-based.  He is fascinated by layering, fragmenting and abstracting of imagery to create dense ambiguous spaces that entices the viewer.  One of the techniques he specialises in is photo intaglio, which, it would seem, is not unlike photogravure.  He uses photographs which are reproduced onto a transparent film and then exposed onto a light sensitive plate.  The emulsion on the plate hardens where it is exposed and will resist acid in the etching process.  The softer areas will be eaten away and will become the recesses which will hold ink.

I was fascinated by his work particularly because he worked in monochrome with images of woodland trees, usually layering images to produce an abstract finished product, but occasionally and relatively straight image.  His work made me think of the images of woodland paths that I have produced for my Body of Work and also my experiments with ICM.

I enjoyed this work and its connection with my own so much that I decided to experiment myself using only photography.  The results are shown below.

I was reasonably happy with these images, but feel that they are perhaps still rather crude and may need more experimentation to achieve the result for which I am looking,  I layered my images in photoshop, but would like to experiement with doing so 'in camera'.  My Fujifilm XE2 will only take two images as a double exposure and I am not sure that I want to go to the expense of a Canon 5D MkIII at the moment.