I made these three prints about Gaza between January and June of 2024. For a description of how and why I made them, click here. To download a pdf version of the article, suitable for printing, click here.

Artistry Theater and Visual Arts, Bloomington, MN, 1/7/20 - 2/23/20

This work encompasses about three years of what I call Ephemeral Process photography---digital scans from black and white paper negatives, printed out with neither developer nor fixer, but with a non-developing accelerator applied by hand to (temporarily) increase the sensitivity to light. Some were made in-camera with long exposures and fast lenses; others were exposed in contact with objects or with old 4x6 color prints. The ephemeral negatives are still light-sensitive, and were in fact damaged by the light of the scanner that captured these digital images.

The colors are real, and arise from an odd synergy between the spectral properties of the light and the unfixed, printed-out colors of the different silver salts in the decades-old B&W enlarging paper I use. The process has an odd combination of physicality and non-permanence, and I find that agreeable at this moment of ever-greater uncertainty---even as I re-image old familiar places and extricate new images from box after box of old prints. For many of these images, the memory of their years-past taking has faded, in a world I increasingly fail to recognize.

Process is an important part of my photography. I do not want perfect control over my art; I want instead to make use of the tension that naturally arises when the artist's conscious control is tempered by technique that is at least partly uncontrollable. Or rather, I want my art to be partly controlled not consciously by myself, but by the world itself. Perhaps some of this comes from the natural scientist in me. The natural sciences are human endeavors, and there is often a particular ``style'' that comes with that. But on the other hand, the scientist doesn't get to just make stuff up without eventual consequence; there is The World, and it would still be there even if we were not.

Perhaps this is why I am drawn to an art that allows me to make my mark in my own way, but only within limits. And the non-photographic content I seek out in my photographs is a way to let Nature (through complex physical processes only partly under my control) touch the surfaces of my pictures directly, in ways that are partially beyond my imagination; my photographs are not made solely by my own hand. Thus I use processes that emphasize the interaction between light and matter, and that call attention to the fact of the flat surface with marks on it. The long time-exposures, combined with shallow depth-of-focus, compresses time and erases movement. The result is sometimes unsettling, but the process of it calms me.

I feel as if I am from some other place that is less absurd. Often at a loss, I make pictures; I hope they evoke a natural world that is bigger and better than all of us, and call attention to our problematic pretense of disconnection with it. But like all photographers, I am simply stuck here trying to arrange lenses and boxes and light-sensitive materials such that Nature makes interesting marks on flat surfaces, in the the hope that someone will see these marks and in so doing, new thoughts and feelings---new things---are created. And so we change a tiny part of Our Only World.

This work encompasses several years of what I call Ephemeral-Process photography–-digital scans from B&W paper negatives, printed out with neither developer nor fixer, but with a non-developing chemical accelerator applied to greatly increase the speed. Some were made in-camera with long exposures; others are photograms, or they were exposed in contact with 4x6 C-prints or digital transparencies. The ephemeral negatives are still light sensitive, and were in fact damaged by the light of the scanner that captured these digital images.

Only simple digital manipulations of overall levels and color balance were performed. Sometimes I make ephemeral prints from digital negatives, to be stored in the dark, and peeked at now and then. To view them is to damage them. The colors are real, and arise from an odd synergy between the spectral response of the different silver salts in the B&W paper, and the scattering colors that appear when one neither develops nor fixes the paper. The non-permanence of this process agrees with me at this moment of great uncertainty, even as I re-photograph familiar places or extricate new images from box after box of old, rejected C-prints. For many, the memory of their taking has faded, in a world I increasingly fail to recognize.

I worked out the details of this process in early 2016, in preparation for teaching a course on photography that summer, in Scotland. I wanted an accessible analog process that required no darkroom facilities, that used only benign chemistry, and that would not necessarily require bright sunlight. In the mid 2000’s I had experimented briefly with exposing enlarging paper in homemade cameras with simple magnifier lenses, and then scanning the resulting paper negative — essentially the same thing I was doing with cyanotype at the time (what I call “cyanonegative photography.”). But I was not impressed with the results; the uniformity of the silver gelatin emulsions made for, in my view, boring pictures.

Out of desparation mostly, I revisited this idea in January of 2016. While testing the printing-out sensitivity of different papers, wet hands after a bathroom break led to my accidental “discovery” that water increases the printing-out speed of silver gelatin emulsions, a fact already known to many photographers who make lumen prints. This allowed for the expressive possiblilites I was looking for, as I could then selectively apply an “accelerator” immediately before exposure, to give the look of a hand-coated emulsion. And so my experiments with “ephemeral process” photography began in earnest.

More information about ephemeral process photography can be found in my 3 volumes of The Physics and Art of Photography.

More ephemeral process pictures can be seen on my The Ephemeral is Real page.

These pictures, arranged in chronological order, were all made in 2020 at my home. Most were taken in the backyard; the rest in either my basement workspace, the front porch, the small rear deck, or the front yard (such as it is).

It is perhaps odd that this was not at all odd. Much of my photography would have been just as local had there been no pandemic. I often work with small snatches of time when I can get them, and much of what I do is experimental. And the techniques I use transport the subject, somewhat, to another time and space. And so it is both convenient and fitting that my living space, the backyard in particular, is my usual test subject. The familiarity of photographing the same shapes again and again calms me.

For these photographs I have used three techniques: ephemeral process photography, solarized instant film negatives, and my water-tank RW Wood fisheye pinhole cameras. All three of these processes are described on my Process page.

Aylward Gallery

Menasha, WI

October 2013

September 25 - November 19, 2006

Luna Cafe, De Pere, Wisconsin

Aylward Gallery, Menasha, WI

June 15 - August 21, 2015

Photographs by John Beaver, Text by Elizabeth Breese and Meredith Mason.  Folding by Elizabeth Breese, Meredith Mason and John Beaver.  Model designs by John Montroll, Peter Engel, Tomoko Fuse, Eric Gjerde, Maruo Hosoya, and Traditional.

Photography uses glass and geometry to redirect rays of light from the 3-dimensional world to a 2-dimensional surface. Origami is the art of folding flat paper into a 3-dimensional structure. We are 3-dimensional, with all our complexity and baggage, but others see us by way of our 2-dimensional surfaces. And we are folded and creased by what has happened to us.
The act of folding rearranges parts, placing opposites and complements next to each other. Unfolding takes apart the big picture and separates it into pieces. Folding is like a mantra. There is, as with all art, a tediousness to the process that can bring comfort.
Using a variety of film and alternative-process techniques – silver gelatin, Polaroid, cyanotype, image transfers, emulsion lifts – all of the photographs in Folded Light, Folded Words incorporate origami in some way, either as subject matter or, more-often, as an integral part of the photographic process itself. In some cases, origami techniques are used to fold the flat light-sensitive material into the very camera used to take the photograph. And so the print was the camera. Other examples allow the folding or unfolding process, in the darkroom, to juxtapose or separate elements of an image, to make something entirely new out of an old negative.

The photographs are accompanied by poems and text by Ohio based poet Elizabeth Breese, and Wisconsin poet Meredith Mason. The photographer and two poets worked both together and independently, sometimes responding to each others work, sometimes not. The only ”rule” was that there be a connection, even if roundabout, to origami.
Breese and Mason were natural choices to be part of this project; not only are they excellent poets, but they are also both accomplished origamists. In addition to the photographs and poems, the exhibition includes displays of the various origami models used to create the photographs, with credit given to their inventors.

Emergence was a collaboration with Judith Waller, and it premiered at the UW-Fox Valley in the Aaron Bohrod Gallery and the Barlow Planetarium in February, 2008.  Emergence: Into the Black was a planetarium show, in collaboration with improvistational cellist Matt Turner.  Emergenence: Out of the Blue was the gallery exhibition, from which I selected these photographs.  The exhibition included paintings by Judith Waller, along with my photographs and some photographs that were collaborations between the two of us.

August 25 - October 2, 2009

Founders Hall Gallery,

Manitowoc, Wisconsin

UW Washington County Art Gallery

August 25 - October 10, 2017

These photographs were taken during my Summer 2016 experience of teaching photography in Dalkeith, Scotland, near Edinburgh, as part of the Wisconsin in Scotland program.  Having never been to the UK, I was hesitant to take typical travel photographs.  I want to understand something before I photograph it, and I want time to just look with my eyes.  Furthermore, why should I so presume to take the pefect photograph of Stirling Castle, when there are people doing that who live there and experience it in ways I never could on my trip?  They understand the context, the light and the seasons.  And so my travel pictures were meant for friends on Facebook, not the walls of a gallery.

But there was an exception, and it in a way fits in to both my personal experience and how we all see a place that we have never seen before, and don't fully understand.  We catch fleeting glimpses of often random and unpredictable details.  And now and then, something seems to come into sharp mental focus.  But if we are honest with ourselves, we don't really know whether we understood at all -- or if instead we completely misinterpreted our seeing and its context. 

On a bus trip from Dalkeith to St Andrews, I took hundreds of pictures out the window of the bus with my decidedly unimpressive DSLR (a Nikon D40), but using a manual lens from the 1970's.  I panned the camera quickly, with a slow shutter speed, from the moving bus.  If one carefully aims at one thing, it sometimes ends up in sharp focus, while everything else swirls around and distorts in complex and unpredictable ways.  Gaps in nearby sructures can act as a sort of focal-plane shutter for more distant objects.  The directions of the swirls, and what turns out to be in focus, often defies after-the-fact explanation.

I here describe a photographic process I call new resinotype. I came up with it in 2021 while working on a book – LoFi Photography: Art from DIY Chemistry and Physics, which is due to be published in 2023 by the Royal Society of Chemistry in London. I wanted something in the spirit of the antiquarian gum bichromate process. Gum bichromate is one of the most elegant of photographic processes, but it has what might be considered a fatal flaw; it requires the use of ammonium or potassium dichromate – examples of hexavalent chromium. So how to do something like this, but still be able to look Erin Brockovich (or even Julia Roberts) in the eye?

Mostly out of desperation, and not expecting it to make anything more than a half-tone image, I began to experiment with UV-curing polymer resins like those used in nail salons and some 3-D
printers. I would expose the resins to an image in ultraviolet, and then dust pigment onto it, with the idea that the pigment would stick to the places that were not cured by the UV light.

Much to my surprise, it soon became clear that a rich, continuous-tone image is possible under the right circumstances. And it can be used as either a negative or direct positive process. Thus began over a year of experimentation. One interesting feature of this process is that there is no water chemistry involved; there is essentially nothing to wash down the drain.

I first presented this process in July of 2022 at the Experimental Photo Festival in Barcelona, Spain, and then again in July of 2023. The New Resinotype process will be described in detail in Lo-Fi Photography, to be published next year. In August, 2023, I gave a presentation on the process to Photo Midwest, based in Madison, WI. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOt6hWHmib8