Mohammadreza Mirzaei is a promising young Iranian photographer.

His photographs are minimalist and clean, men are reduced to minute black silhouette under a huge white sky, tiny pieces lost in a boundless green lawn. Definitively small, viewed from above or far away. Intent without end in the recitation of life, in those small facts of the daily theater of existence. Or again they are photographing tirelessly, each one ore some invisible monument. The remoteness, detachment, the size of these people united to the essentialness of photographs, make men, women and children photographed by Mohammadreza Mirzaei universal beings, general icons of the human kind.

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Waiting for the photo gallery and a more detailed report, there it is a little animation showing us inside the infinite cube city.

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Mehrdad Naraghi is an Iranian young photographer that I discovered the last year during the exhibition Photo Quai. I was immediately fascinated by his photographs of the city at night, dark, confused, where trees seem skeletal hands towards the sky and windows empty eyes.

As a consequence I contacted him, proposing an interview. I like the idea of giving space on Camera Obscura to a photographer who, at least in my imagination, comes from so far, I like the idea that the causality of a meeting with his images on the bridge of Paris, at the end produces this article.

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Last week I finally put online some files of the photos infinite palaces and buildings from my series of repetitive elements. Photos on which I worked for more than one year and that I have repeatedly cited writing on this blog. At the same time I published on Camera Obscura a brochure showing one of the installations that can be made starting from these giant photographs of buildings.

This is Infinite Cube City (pdf, 2.0Mb), a cube of 3m where the walls are built precisely using a photo of the series: the palace near Place d’Italie

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It’s been a long time since I first tried to convert pictures into drawings, or more precisely, since I first tried to define a procedure that allows the simulation of a charcoal, pencil, blood drawing from a picture.

The majority of the online tutorials use automatic Photoshop filters, that I personally consider awful, both artistic, stylization and border identification ones. Images always seem a little bit artificial, the artistic technique they refer in reality are really different, you always notice it’s a filtered picture and not a real drawing and all of those images are extremely similar to each others. It is recommended to work with your own two hands, more than entrust an automatic system.

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The first European retrospective of Edward Steichen has been presented during the last months of 2007 at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. It was an exhibition I had to visit because, even if I knew the most famous images of Steichen, I barely saw his original works of his first pictorialist years. Moreover, the 450 photos that were part of the exhibition were a sure promise to deepen the knowledge of one of the most prolific and incisive photographer of the last century.

The exhibition starts, as expected, with the first pictorialist pictures of the beginning of the long Steichen career. I deeply looked all the pictures from the technique side, as I am an insider and a printer of antique techniques, even if I didn’t forget the aesthetic side.

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Dorothy Simpson Krause is an American artist who works mainly with collage, combining traditional materials with digital techniques.

She is not a photographer, but she makes intensive use of photography in her collage. Typically her work would be considered non-photographic, and classified under some form of visual art but not “Photography”. For a long time I have been tried to convince photographers that the border between photographic image and other visual arts is not as sharp and it is not easy to determine what photography is and what is not. Indeed, the question itself has no real sense, because photography is an ambiguous media, photography is actually a term commonly used to group practices also substantially different between them. For this reason I’m happy to have on Camera Obscura such an artist, that move the border of photo art.

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Ruud van Empel is a photographer who obtains its images pasting together many different photographies, obtaining huge collages that however mantain a very photorealistic look. In this way Ruud van Empel recreates the dreamy and colorful world of his imagination, a northern or tropical forests, surreal offices, where he places his environmental portraits.

Although the issues addressed are very different, as the aesthetic impact, Ruud van Empel has an approach that particularly interests me, because I’m currently exploring similar opportunity, trying to take the best of the digital tools available today. Photocollage is one of the most powerful and interesting of these instruments. For this reason I have contacted him and we had the opportunity to exchange a few words about his work.

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Massimo Attardi is an artist that absolutely uses bichromate gum in a personal and iconoclastical way. The often conformed panorama of alternative and antique print techniques reborn with his work. A classical technique such as the gum one, exploited for decades, has been reinvented and put in service of real expressive exigencies, giving life to Massimo Attardi’s personal and identifying visual world.

It has for sure been a pleasure when Massimo Attardi accepted to be interviewed and let me publish some of his recent photographs on Camera Obscura.

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All of the cyanotype toning formulas that I tried, completely bleaching the image in an alkali and re-developing it in a tanning agent for a long time, gave red-browned flat hues with a little dmax. I always obtained best results with long tanning bathes and a quick immersion in a diluted alkali, which gave a print with warm grey, brown or pink lights, while shadows are intense blue, slightly violet or black. A part of the original blue of the cyanotype is conserved in the final print, giving not only a cold hue to shadows, but also keeping relatively high the dmax, penalized by a complete alkaline whitening.

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The majority of the alternative techniques and historical processes are not so sensible to light and it is therefore impossible to use an enlarger as on traditional fiber paper prints. Negatives are printed with contact print technique.

If there’s even a minimum space between paper and negative, it could be the littlest – it doesn’t matter, the final image – at best- won’t have the finest details and the micro-contrast, will be blurry and soft. When the space augments, there will be completely blurred zones, particularly bothersome and impossible to hide.

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The printer often follows the developing phase or the development of a gum bichromate print with few agitation and no interventions, and it is therefore called passive development. This is the most photographic form of the developing phase for the gum, the one that keeps the finest details of the print, that doesn’t present visible external intrusions, that has the less pictorial aspect.

As the immobility of the development bath, you must pay attention not to form or leave trapped air bubbles under the paper. In this case water is no more in contact with the print and less developed zones carve out. It’s easy recognizing those types of imperfections from other halos or similar defaults, as in the case of bubbles, the stains are perfectly circular and have defined borders.

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In July I attended a stage of carbon print held by Damiano Bianca. The stage has been programmed and structured with him and, for those who’re interested, it is possible to make arrangements for similar courses, individually deciding arguments, duration, modalities and subscription costs.

I took part in course every afternoon for almost a week, in Rome, inside the Damiano Bianca’s perfectly equipped dark room.

First day has been dedicated to a generic introduction of carbon print, followed by a practical demonstration by Damiano with materials he prepared before the lesson. Then he taught an argument per day, deepening the theoretical and practical aspect of each one.

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I always had hard times sizing the paper used for printing in a fulfilling way. That’s the reason why I always tried to avoid sizing my supports. If this is possible with the ferric salts and the one coat gums, it is a serious problem when you want to obtain clean whites with multiple dichromate gums prints.

I never obtained good results laying gelatine, as the brush raises bubbles and bristle streaks. Dipping always gave big and ugly dregs once hanged out the paper to dry. Moreover, it is necessary to harden it twice and dry it inverting the bottom with the top to obtain a uniform gelatine thickness on the entire sheet; otherwise the gelatine will be thicker on the bottom.

During the month of July Damiano Bianca showed me how to lay gelatine using a threading tube large as much as the sheet.

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A printing frame (Italian article) -chassis presse in French or pressino/torchietto in Italian- is an essential instrument for every printer of alternative techniques and historical processes. Almost the totality of the antique print techniques is contact printings. It is therefore necessary a perfect adhesion between negative and printing support to gain all the finest details and even the presence of unpleasant flou zones. Moreover, it is necessary to inspection the print to determine the correct exposition without losing the register between negative and print.

These two fundamental characteristics of the printing frames are easily obtainable on little size. The traditional printing system is less and less efficient when working on sizes bigger than 20×30cm. It is then necessary an expensive and often loud vacuum pump system.

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