Bond. 20# Bond.

The north light had not come up full yet when I coated another test, a small four by five square of paper laid flat on the table while the studio was still half dark and still smelling faintly of the citrus solvent I had used the night before. I have done this enough times now that my hands know the motion before my brain is awake. Brush loaded, even pass, edge to edge, the surface going dull and wet and then slowly drawing the coating down into itself. I stood there watching it settle and I asked the question I keep coming back to, the one I keep not quite answering. Is this thing dead?

It is not dead. I want to say that plainly so the rest of this makes sense. Common Ground is not dead. For anyone just joining me, it is the series I have been building toward all year, a traveling body of work that takes famous old American photographs, the Depression-era ones by people like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, and remakes them by hand. Not copies. The photograph becomes a base I print and then work back into, until it has been carried across time into something slightly different than what it was. 

These photographs cannot really be improved, and I would never claim to. That is not what this is. That is the project. And right now it is doing what almost everything in this studio eventually does, which is morph, reconstruct itself, become a slightly different animal than the one I started feeding. I used to think that was a failure of discipline. I have made a kind of peace with it now. It seems to be part of how I work, this constant remaking, and most weeks I am genuinely okay with it. Some weeks it is the whole point.

Here is what changed. The Bali trip got postponed. Not cancelled, postponed, because the airfare nearly doubled between the time I planned it and the time I went to actually book it, and there is a difference between committing to a residency and committing to a residency at twice the cost of getting there. So it moves to next year. And the strange gift of that postponement was that it knocked loose a question that had been sitting on the edges of my subconscious for months, never quite examined. I love gum oil printing. I do. But was it actually the right process for Common Ground, or had I just fallen for it the way you fall for a beautiful tool and then go looking for a job to justify owning it? If it was right, why. If it was not, why not. Those are the exact kind of questions I love, the ones with no clean answer that make you put your hands on the work to find out. So I decided that would be the quest for the week.

There were other things I could have been doing. Probably some I should have been doing. The could is never in question, there is always a list. The should is a softer word than people pretend it is. And honestly, that uncertainty is the draw, isn't it? That open space where you get to follow the thing that is actually tugging at you instead of the thing that is merely scheduled. So I spent the week back inside the old photographic processes, the non silver, hand built, slow ones I have known for decades and not visited in years.

I started with cyanotype, because it is the friendliest door back in. And I love the process. I do not love the color. That Prussian blue is gorgeous on the right image and wrong, just wrong, for what these particular pictures are asking for. These are public domain, FSA, celebrate-America pictures, and the blue fights them. Maybe split toning, I thought, bleach it back and tone it into something earthier. Closer. Still not it. What I was actually chasing, if I am honest, was the print quality you get from platinum palladium, that long velvet tonal range that looks like the image was breathed onto the paper rather than printed on it, except I needed it to scale cleanly to twenty four by thirty, and platinum at that size is a different financial planet. Hmm. Should I just go platinum, or platinum on vellum over gold leaf, and drop the size to five by seven, a postage stamp by comparison? So I kept moving. Kallitype. Van Dyke brown. Salt printing, which I had not touched since I was a much younger man with much more patience for failure.

It was, I should say, genuinely fun, getting my hands back into processes I used to know cold and feeling the old muscle memory wake up. But each one missed. Too flat. Too grainy. No dynamic range. Or something I could not even name, a wrongness I could feel but not point to, which is its own special torture because you cannot fix what you cannot describe. And underneath all of it, a wall. I still had nowhere to make large format negatives at twenty four by thirty for contact printing. I had cleared out the sixty inch printer in a fit of simplification and settled on a seventeen inch, the right call for everything except this. The work kept skirting the thing I was reaching for, and so did I.

And then it happened the way these things almost always happen for me, which is sideways, while I was thinking about something else entirely. I was unboxing a few things, doing the slow shuffle I do to get back into the studio mindset, letting the subconscious run loose in the background the way you let a dog off the leash and trust it to come back. And I noticed an image leaning against the wall on the floor of the studio library amidst some unpacked boxes. A black and white, hand colored test of my oldest daughter, made in the eighties, printed on watercolor paper and worked into by hand with conté, pastel, graphite, pencil. I started doing that in the late seventies. It is, in some real sense, the oldest thing my hands know how to do. It is not pretty, and honestly it is a little embarrassing to show experimental work from that long ago. But we all have to start somewhere.

Silver Nitrate BW Test Print Hand Colored 1989

Ding, ding, ding. You know the feeling. The one where something that was sitting in plain sight your whole life suddenly stands up and waves. Because that photograph on the floor is the same thing I still do today, just with newer tools in the middle. Capture a photograph, into Photoshop, into Corel Painter, print, and then hand embellish or overpaint with traditional media. I have been doing some version of that move for almost fifty years, the Corel Painter and Photoshop part obviously not in the picture until 1990 and 1991. I had been hunting all week for an exotic process to honor these images and the answer was a process I never stopped using.

I should admit something here, because if I am feeling it, somebody reading this is feeling it too. Part of me flinches at the whole premise. Who am I to put my hands on a Lange or an Evans, pictures that are close to sacred, pictures that do not need me or anyone at all? I have asked that since the day I started, and I have not fully answered it. But the longer I worked, the clearer one thing became. The answer was not to reach for the grandest, most precious process I could find, as if reverence meant gold and platinum and museum rag. The reverence ran the other direction. These were photographs of ordinary people on ordinary days, and the honest way to touch them was on the plainest paper there is, worked by an ordinary man, making no claim to improve them, only to carry them forward in my own way to open questions. Conversation.

Which brought me, finally, to bond. The most unassuming, general, common paper there is. Twenty pound bond. The stuff that is cheap and everywhere and that nobody romanticizes, the paper you would never put on a list of fine art surfaces. I am blessed to have an outstanding local print shop here, and they run oversize copies for me all the time, no drama, no minimum, no waiting on a coating to dry. That print shop is quietly the foundation of a huge amount of my experimental work and I almost never mention it. If I printed the FSA images onto bond and then worked back into them by hand with conté and graphite and charcoal, expanding the tonal range myself instead of begging a chemical process to give it to me, it fit. It solved the large format wall, because the shop can print almost any size I want. No problem at all for the mere twenty four by thirties I would need. And it honored the remake and interpretation the project always asked for, because the hand goes back into every single one.

FSA Photograph from the Library of Congress

There is a piece of history I love here, and it kept surfacing while I worked. Ian Fleming wanted the dullest, plainest name he could find for his spy. He had a book on his desk, a field guide to the birds of the West Indies, written by an American ornithologist named James Bond, and he took the name precisely because it was unremarkable, something flat and common for the extraordinary adventures to stand against. The plainness was the point. The ordinary name made the extraordinary feel more extraordinary. I am a lifelong Fleming reader, so the joke wrote itself the moment I settled on the paper. Bond. Twenty pound Bond. But the joke turned out to be the thesis. I spent a week reaching for every extraordinary process I could think of, and the thing that finally fit was the most common paper in the world, made extraordinary only by the hand that goes back into it.

So Bali, when it comes next year, gets to be pure fun. Not a grind, not me trying to crank out fourteen large format positives and fourteen thirty by forty gum oil prints in a borrowed studio on a clock. I can go to learn, to put my hands in the gum oil process for its own sake, to tighten those chops without the weight of a whole series riding on the output. The trip got better the moment it stopped having to carry the project. The project got better the moment it stopped having to wait for the trip.

I am printing the first one next week. The print shop will hand me a flat oversize sheet still warm from the machine, an FSA face on the cheapest paper they sell, and I will carry it back here and set it on the table where the daughter photograph has sat against the wall, watching. Then the conté comes out, and the graphite, and the hand goes back in. That part has never once changed. It turns out it never had to.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.

Tio