Bernard Plossu is a photographer who perhaps has not been given the appreciation he deserves in the English dominated photographic world (by English I refer of course to the language they speak in America.) There has always been a philosophical background to his work as with many things French, and doubtless his own minimal almost non-existent website in some way reflects that, though you can see more of his work at Galerie Camera Obscura.
The text on the English version of La Lettre de la Photographie in the feature Monet at Giverny by Bernard Plossu is not too easy to follow (presumably a machine translation), and if you can read a little French the original makes more sense.
Plossu likes small prints – the colour images are 18x24cm or less and the black and white only 11.4×7.6cm, around 4.5×3 inches, around the size of most people’s family pictures when I was small, representing only roughly a 3x linear enlargement from his 35mm negatives. There can be a certain exquisite quality to small black and white prints like this but looking at the images in the slide show on screen, I’m not sure that these prints possess it (and looking at the images full-screen I see them rather too large for his aesthetic.) But these are prints by Guillaume Geneste, of La Chambre Noire, one of the best printers in Paris, and not far from my favourite area of the city.
The colour images, printed by the Fresson process I think I like less. It’s a pigment process which uses four exposures with colour separated negatives onto a rather granular pigmented gelatine made light sensitive with a dichromate, with the unhardened material being washed or even abraded off the paper with a sawdust slurry, although the details are a trade secret.
The earliest monochrome prints made in this way used finely divided carbon particles as the pigment, often ‘lamp black’ made by cooling smoke on a cold surface, and were called carbon prints, and the image hardens from the top surface which was exposed to sunlight (or other UV source) down. Because of this the process became known as carbon printing. In traditional carbon printing the exposed layer is covered by a sticker gelatine coated paper and adhered to this before being washed to remove the original porous paper backing and unhardened gelatin that was left below the hardened image.
The Fresson process was one method that eliminated the need for transfer, enabling the print to be produced directly on the coated material – a direct carbon process. Probably the secret relied on thinner coatings with paper with a good ‘tooth’ and perhaps a certain ‘graininess’ in the coating producing a kind of crude half-tone.
They call the process for colour printing ‘quadrichromie’ and it was developed from the original single colour process first exhibited in 1899 by Théodore-Henri Fresson (which took his name) and marketed by the family. A two year research project by his son and grandson resulted in the first charcoal colour print in 1952, and the process provided by their family firm became popular with advertising and fine art photographers in the 1960s and 70s.
The effect is similar to a tri-colour gum bichromate print, and gives a very painterly effect with the texture of the paper and a usually subdued rather pastel colour. Although some Fresson prints I’ve seen have been very nice as objects, the process with its characteristic palette often seems to overwhelm the subject matter, and I think it may do so here, though it’s obviously unfair to judge from the web images.
Somehow too the Fresson doesn’t quite for me sing the right tune for Monet, and I think it lacks the kind of clarity I see in his works. Though I’ve never been to Giverny I have spent some considerable time with his works in our splendid National Gallery. Often when photographing protests in Whitehall or Trafalgar Square I’ve had a few minutes to spare and have slipped into it to stand in front of works such as his The Waterlily Pond painted in 1899 at Giverny.
I wonder if Plossu might have been better to make use of modern technology to achieve similar but purer effects, processing with Photoshop (I’m not entirely convinced by this example) and printing with pigment inks on suitably textured watercolour paper. It’s a thought that will be heresy to many.
There are a small number of Plossu’s earlier Fresson images on the Camera Obscura site, some of which I think are more suited to the process, but it is his black and white work that interests me more.
The show is at the Musée des impressionnismes Giverny across the summer, until 31 October and perhaps this will be the year when I finally get to Giverny. It would certainly be more pleasant than watching the Olympics.
rosenrod bivirkninger…
Monet at Giverny « >Re: PHOTO…