Preface

This book is something of a culmination of the past 25 years of my experience with art photography. My formal training is in physics and astronomy, but much of my professional career has revolved around interdisciplinary projects with artists. Judith Baker Waller, Professor Emeritus of Art at University of Wisconsin Oshkosh is a good example; her mentoring and the many art–science collaborative projects we worked on together served as much of my art education. And it was during these years, guided by her tutelage and that of others, that I came into my own as an art photographer specializing in experimental photographic processes.

Lo-Fi Photography has some things in common with my previous books connecting photography and physics, but it is both less technical and more practical, and it is aimed at a somewhat-different audience. On the one hand, I hope this book can be a worthy introduction for many to a set of simple but intriguing photographic processes. Some of the chapters that follow travel on well-trodden ground, the cyanotype process (Chapter 9), for example, has been described in detail in dozens of other publications. As such, my introduction to the topic is only enough to get one started, and I defer to the excellent work of others for a more advanced treatment. I believe, however, that my own take on even this well-studied topic has some unexpected twists that are of interest even to the seasoned experimental photographer.

In what follows I assume of the reader no prior knowledge of photography or the physics and chemistry behind it. Furthermore, the goal is not to provide a comprehensive guide to all of alternative photography, but rather to demonstrate a few basic ways of doing things that are well tested, with an emphasis on understanding how and why these processes work. It is my intention that this may lay the groundwork for the reader to more easily learn the rest in their own way (a section near the end provides a list of useful resources).

Despite the introductory nature of the material, there are some things in Lo-Fi Photography that are, to my knowledge, new and unpublished elsewhere, and some of this may be of interest to experienced alternative-process photographers. This includes a historical note about Mary Somerville, the “new resinotype” process described in Chapter 10, innovative methods for measuring the size of a pinhole for pinhole photography, and instructions for making an accessible, DIY view camera, designed specifically for photographic materials of very-low sensitivity. In addition, Chapters 11, 14, and 15 describe little-known (and I believe under-utilized) photographic techniques that are briefly outlined in my previous books, but for which Lo-Fi Photography provides the first detailed guide.