Salty

I’ve noted before that there just aren’t that many contemporary artists using the Salt Print process out there, so it’s been tough finding things to show as inspiration. The slides I showed the class on our initial Demo day included historical work, plus varnished Salt Prints from France Scully Osterman, and a project by Matthew Brandt. The latter work included photographs of bodies of water, printed using salt water from the same source. More intriguingly, Brandt also made portraits of people using body fluids related to that person, mixed into the Salt of the print…

For the most part, however, a survey of Salt Prints made in the last 20 years don’t look that much different from those made in the first 20 years of Photography (although the negatives are sharper now!) What I mean is, one will see a lot of landscapes and still lifes of flowers… Nevertheless, they will certainly be beautiful and luminous, to show off the long tonal scale of this particular process.

Christina Z. Anderson has a fantastic book on Salt Printing, easily the best and most practical if you want to get into this process. For Ellie Young’s deep technical dive, find her book here. In full disclosure, I do Salt Prints too…