THE UNBORN
The nine photographs in my latest series THE UNBORN, are portraits of pre-natal subjects who were conceived in the first half of the 20th century and died of natural causes. These portraits are bookends to my ongoing exploration of what makes us human, which began with my post-mortem series, THE TRAVELERS. They are about what all of us are like before we enter the world. They show us the unseen.
I don’t know much about the figures here. Unlike the post-mortem photographs, which I made after the entire story of a human life had been told, with THE UNBORN I can only guess what these subject’s lives might have been. My intention was not to make documents of a physical state but to make portraits that provoke thought and trigger ideas about how we all began. Everyone will experience them through the lens of their own emotions, and there is no right or wrong way to respond. Although we can never really know anything about the nine figures in my series, we can each write their stories, if only in our imagination.
PLATINUM PALLADIUM PRINTS
After much experimentation I decided to print THE UNBORN portraits as platinum palladium prints. The depth, richness, and timeless quality of the monochrome platinum tones helped create layers of emotion in an otherworldly, abstract way. They are printed on Japanese gampi rather than on traditional fine art watercolor paper. Gampi bark yields a strong, crisp sheet that is translucent, with almost no visible fibers, a very smooth surface, and a satin-like sheen that becomes even more apparent with the thinner sheets. The unique properties of gampi allowed me to mirror the fragility of my subjects in a pure, unsentimental way while retaining the beauty and delicacy of the subject matter.
The platinum palladium process is a 19th-century, handcrafted, non-silver photographic technique known for producing archival, matte, and tonally rich monochrome prints. It involves coating fine art paper, in this case Japanese gampi, with a light-sensitive mix of platinum and palladium salts. Each of The UNBORN photographs is 20 x 24 inches made from 16 x 20 inch negatives placed directly onto the gampi with no enlargement and exposed to UV light.