Atkins Labcast
Hosted by Kate and Paul Atkins, the third generation owners of the oldest photo lab in Australia. A podcast about living with and loving photography. From philosophy to technicalities, for amateurs, artists and professionals, we talk about it all.
Atkins Labcast
Atkins Labcast Episode 31 - Leanne McPhee
Leanne McPhee is Paul’s guest for this episode. Leanne is a photographer who predominantly works in the field of alternative processes. She has recently written and had published a book on the Chrysotype process.
Leanne’s website:
http://leannemcphee.com
Leanne on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/chrysotyper/?hl=en
Leanne’s book “Chrysotype” on Booktopia:
https://www.booktopia.com.au/chrysotype-leanne-mcphee/book/9781138344990.html
Leanne, Senior Social Innovator on TACSI:
https://www.tacsi.org.au/our-people/leanne-mcphee/
Leanne on Alternative Photography website:
http://www.alternativephotography.com/gallery/artists-a-z-by-first-name/leanne-mcphee/
Hidden Places Hidden Lives Exhibition
http://leannemcphee.com/hidden-places-hidden-lives
Mike Ware - Prints of Gold: the Chrysotype Process Re-invented
https://www.mikeware.co.uk/mikeware/Prints_of_Gold.html
Gold Street Studios
https://www.goldstreetstudios.com.au
Happy New Year, Kate. Yeah. Welcome to the
SPEAKER_01:Atkins Labcast World. Happy Coup Year.
SPEAKER_02:What's Coup Year
SPEAKER_01:mean? You know, because there was a coup in America. Oh, yeah. Coup with a
SPEAKER_02:P in the end.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Coup.
SPEAKER_02:Happy
SPEAKER_01:Coup America. Finally, not as much fun.
SPEAKER_02:Welcome back to 2021 and the Atkins Labcast.
SPEAKER_01:Well, they haven't had a 2021 before. Oh, okay. This is the first one, right?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Totally. Totally. And we've got a great guest this time. Yes. We've got Leanne McPhee, who is the one, the last episode we recorded last year.
SPEAKER_01:You recorded it last year? I recorded it last year. But this is this year. No, you recorded the interview.
SPEAKER_02:We recorded the interview
SPEAKER_01:all of last year. Bloody hell. Feels like a year away.
SPEAKER_02:I know. And technically, it's 17 days back. Well, it's been more than 17 that recorded. But we've had one hell of a Christmas at the lab. It
SPEAKER_01:was a brutal end to the year.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean it was brutal in the amount of work and the hours. We had four people for two weeks that we basically paid for 60-hour weeks for. And then you and I both did 80-hour weeks.
SPEAKER_01:At least.
SPEAKER_02:So we had had enough of everything by the time.
SPEAKER_01:So careful what you wish for moment.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, because the sales were really good. It was great in that respect. but we didn't quite have the people to do it. We ended up bringing a couple of school kids in to help out, which was fantastic.
SPEAKER_01:They weren't our children. That's right, because our children are too damn lazy.
SPEAKER_02:We do love them, but, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Do we love them this week?
SPEAKER_02:Well, we do, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Have you seen our living room?
SPEAKER_02:We have, yes. We've got an Ikea splurge in our living room as Josephine re-does her room
SPEAKER_01:with Ikea. And refuses to actually bring the furniture into her room. She just leaves it in our living room.
SPEAKER_02:So that was crazy work-wise, but also we had the new product, the cards and calendars.
SPEAKER_01:Which almost broke my sanity.
SPEAKER_02:Which was amazing. And during the process of it, after all of our testing leading up to it, the system fell down. Basically, let's say there's four ways it can fall down. It fell down three of the four ways.
SPEAKER_01:Oh,
SPEAKER_02:God. And
SPEAKER_01:who knew that it was so damn hard to get paper? Because we're at a different end. Don't
SPEAKER_02:just cut a tree down.
SPEAKER_01:With the ephemera products, it's a different end of the market. Like the paper is lower cost and it's somewhat more commonly available. Can
SPEAKER_02:you get it from Officeworks, the paper?
SPEAKER_01:No.
SPEAKER_02:No. So it's not an Officeworks paper.
SPEAKER_01:It's not. And as I was saying, it's more commonly available. It's not. The paper comes from one company and there's one person who sells it. And you're
SPEAKER_02:so picky there had to be one kind of paper.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, but in the end, we had no choice. We had to change papers twice because they just ran out of stock and they don't keep stock in South Australia and it was a whole thing. It was a nightmare. And the
SPEAKER_02:machine we were testing, we turned out not to be happy
SPEAKER_01:with. We're not loving that machine. So... For those of you who ordered ephemera products. We love you and thank you. We love you and thank you. However, we hope to bring a much better quality image and more consistent and better paper type. next– well, this year, basically.
SPEAKER_02:So how did the stands, you know, the things that present the images go? I think everyone absolutely loved those.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I've had no complaints on that front. I was happy with how that all performed.
SPEAKER_02:They're stunning. They
SPEAKER_01:really are. It's still so much fun to make the aged zeal one, to watch them age in the– I need to do a video of that. I keep forgetting.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely. No, it's killer. It's a great product. But, yeah, it was one of those months– That was crazy. But also not only a lot went out, but Australia Post pretty much delivered everything. I went to the post office every week, like we closed for two weeks, to pick up stuff that had skipped off or bounced or went to the wrong address. I reckon I picked maybe four small packages up. So that really wasn't a thing. Yeah. The other thing is we weren't loaded up with a proportionate amount of complaints. This was wrong, that was wrong.
SPEAKER_01:No, we did have a bit of a fail. One of our suppliers, the one that gives us the glass boxes, has changed its packaging. They
SPEAKER_02:were coming in a big styrofoam
SPEAKER_01:brick, basically. Yeah, which worked great. But they're ugly as hell and
SPEAKER_02:you felt like you were
SPEAKER_01:burning the environment down. I know, but we had no damage at all. Like we had no damaged products. And these new nice
SPEAKER_02:cardboard
SPEAKER_01:boxes. The cardboard boxes are beautiful, but they are wrecking them. So we're changing all of that. So we've had a bit of a fail on that front. But not for a while
SPEAKER_02:because we've got a whole lot of them in these beautiful cardboard
SPEAKER_01:boxes. Yeah, but we're changing how we're sending those ones off so that they're more properly protected.
SPEAKER_02:But realistically, out of all of them that went out, how many failed? It was still a very small percentage.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, but it's still... With things like that, people are hesitant to... to order the glass boxes because they're like, it's a glass box, it's going to smash. And I'm like, it's travelled a fair bit of way to get to us, so it's probably going to be fine just getting over to Sydney. And because we haven't had any problems. Like we've had like one breakage of a glass box in all the time we've been selling glass boxes except for this recent lot where I think we had three clients let down by it. So that's entirely too many. It really
SPEAKER_02:is. It is three too many. But it really was a remarkable experience. and everything kind of fell in place. And so we took a really nice couple of weeks off and didn't really relax after the first week. We felt like
SPEAKER_01:we stopped. Since when do we relax? How do you do that again? This
SPEAKER_02:is the first year I actually didn't worry about us being closed and wishing that we had been open because we were missing out on work. Oh, my God. So that was one of those– but we're back open. If people
SPEAKER_01:changed labs that easily, we would have all the clients. Yeah. Like probably one of our biggest issues of getting clients is how hard it is to change labs for people. People don't change labs easily at all.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. You know? So talking about papers, Leanne's… Here we are segueing back to the
SPEAKER_01:interview. Jesus, that was quick. You're off. No, I'm not. That's it. Now we're done. Straight to the
SPEAKER_02:interview.
SPEAKER_01:We just took the dog for a walk and talked about 38,000 things we're going to talk about on the podcast. Yeah. You've done a quick rundown about I relaxed. We had a good Christmas. That's it. Right. Now, next.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, it's not really next. But we did have a very nice little Christmas
SPEAKER_01:break. So one of the podcasts that I listened to that I really loved was Over the Break was a podcast of, and now it's all gone. Every name has fallen out of my fucking head. Anyway, he's a comedian. She's a writer. And they did a lockdown podcast when the lockdown first started. I'll give you the name. Hang on,
SPEAKER_02:the lockdown where?
SPEAKER_01:The first, first lockdown in America. Oh,
SPEAKER_02:okay. So it's an
SPEAKER_01:American podcast.
SPEAKER_02:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:And it was really beautiful. And they're a husband and wife team. And they talk to each other for an hour. And they are charming and lovely and wonderful for an hour.
SPEAKER_02:And
SPEAKER_01:you have managed seven minutes. Seven minutes and you're like, that's it. Enough talking to my stupid wife.
SPEAKER_02:Are they nice to each other though?
SPEAKER_01:They are as nice to each other as we. Well, they're very newly married. So they're a lot nicer to each other than we are. All right. That'll change. Don't you worry.
SPEAKER_02:Come on. Come on
SPEAKER_01:now. Well, I'm just saying.
SPEAKER_02:Come on now.
SPEAKER_01:So, you know, we could try to talk to each other for longer than seven minutes, you know. We
SPEAKER_02:could, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:You know, we walk the dog. That's like half an hour. Yes. But we don't podcast that because then we have to listen to the wind and nobody likes the car traffic noise. That's
SPEAKER_02:a good point. That's a good point. So, yeah, I was thinking about the interview with Leanne because it was a long time ago and we
SPEAKER_01:both had to have a chat. Yeah, straight fucking back. Okay, fine. Yeah. Yep. It's a great interview. There's some funky sound, though.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, well, yeah, we're having some audio problems, and I'm not quite sure whether we're interested to hear if this recording of you is...
SPEAKER_01:Hey, I'm perfect.
SPEAKER_02:I don't think you always are.
SPEAKER_01:But I am sitting in the seat where she was, so if the problem is with this... With
SPEAKER_02:the audio gear. Mind you, I had unplugged it and replugged it all to check it.
SPEAKER_01:Well, you know, that's all you have to do to fix it.
SPEAKER_02:That's right. Open and shut the door. Imagine owning a Tesla. What happens when the software goes into you? When you restart the car, what happens?
SPEAKER_01:We should buy a Tesla so we can find out.
SPEAKER_02:We don't have that kind of
SPEAKER_01:Tesla money. No, we do not. We don't have Tesla money. You know what though? Not recent lab owners, old lab owners. Old lab owners have like plenty of money for that shit because they lived in the 80s.
SPEAKER_02:Our friend Nathan Caso in Melbourne. Is he a lab owner? No, he's not. But he, talking Tesla, He on his Instagram had a picture of a Land Rover with an electric motor, one that was fairly new. Well, it was newly done, but it was the same sort of vintage as mine, 60s.
SPEAKER_01:So does that mean that… So instead of a Tesla, we can electrify
SPEAKER_02:the Land Rover.
SPEAKER_01:So the breaking down of the car that happens just naturally every sort of 100 kilometres, does that sync with its battery usage?
SPEAKER_02:What?
SPEAKER_01:So like it breaks down and runs out of battery all at the same time. It never breaks down. Never. Never.
SPEAKER_02:It's one of those cars that just keeps starting.
SPEAKER_01:It keeps starting. It just doesn't need to go anywhere. No, don't drive it
SPEAKER_02:anywhere. That's a big help. That's a big benefit. Yeah, so let's go back to our guest because the guest is
SPEAKER_01:really… Hey, you got us off the guest and onto the bloody Land Rovers as usual. Because we were
SPEAKER_02:talking about ephemera and the kind of chrysotype printing that Leanne's talking about is really not ephemera. It is the opposite of ephemera. I've got a book here and Kate just had a bit of a flip through it. And the book is, you know, like a centimetre and a half thick. And, I mean, it's a lot of super information about the process.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, my God. She is like an academic extraordinaire. I
SPEAKER_02:know. It's not a straight process for making a print. No,
SPEAKER_01:it's very complicated and there's a lot of science which made my head hurt.
SPEAKER_02:I think once you've been through the process, I don't think it's as complicated as making it feel on the outside, but it really is celebrating that. one object that you've made. And of course, you know, chrysotype is gold, printing with gold. And shockingly, it's not gold. It's very stable. Yeah, you'd think the prints would be shiny, shiny, shiny,
SPEAKER_01:shiny. Well, at least yellow. Yes,
SPEAKER_02:they're not, are they? No, they're not yellow. No, they're not yellow. Yeah, it's very interesting, isn't
SPEAKER_01:it? People, before the interview, they need to sit their butts down and look it up.
SPEAKER_02:Look up Christotype. But actually seeing a Christotype print in the flesh is also a really beautiful thing to see. I think so. And that's a hard thing to do, but you could always hop on and purchase one of Leanne's because she does have work for sale, which is pretty cool. So Christotype sort of adds into the whole range of techniques for making prints from a photograph you've already taken. So it's not something you stick in the camera. It's something that you've got a negative that you've made and it's contact printing. So you need to make– if you want a big print, you need a big negative to print from. So it's on the whole Fox Talbot line of techniques of way of making paper sensitive so that you can expose it. And I think it's so beautiful and delicate. And what I love is we've got an interview guest here and a local photographer named who's happy to write the, I think it's the definitive instruction book on how to do it and to celebrate this print technology that I'd really not heard of until I'd started seeing her work on it. And here she is a few years later, she's popped out the book on
SPEAKER_01:it. Well, and it's a hard thing. I mean, I can't see that, you know, your local craft shop's going to be selling kits for it.
SPEAKER_02:No, it's not like cyanotype. But it's not that different from cyanotype. It's along that vein of work that cyanotype has got. It's really impressive to see. Yeah, so I met Leanne through the Centre for Creative Photography and it turns out that, and I was just looking at her. From which all glorious things come. Seems to be so much glorious stuff.
SPEAKER_01:Including an incredibly impressive chickpea curry that we had at their Christmas party.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, at their New Year party, at their celebration
SPEAKER_01:party. Which I'm still trying to work out how they made that so damn
SPEAKER_02:good. The recipes have been circulated.
SPEAKER_01:Have they? Yes,
SPEAKER_02:they
SPEAKER_01:have. Where? Why haven't I got that one? I will send you the email. That's the one I
SPEAKER_02:want. I will send you the email. Will you? Yes, I will. I
SPEAKER_01:really liked it.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. The other thing I thought was fascinating about Leanne was that she's a senior social innovator at her work. So her other work is looking at how to make– how to help people live in their homes better.
SPEAKER_01:It sounds like someone who's really good like on TikTok, but that's not actually what it is, a social innovator. Oh, yeah, I know what you mean. No,
SPEAKER_02:it's not social media. No, not at all. It's the story of how you– Get inside someone's head and find out what could be done to make their life better. And she works with old
SPEAKER_01:people. So the opposite of Facebook.
SPEAKER_02:Quite right. And it's not surveys either. It's not here, fill the survey form out. It's about design-led innovation. It's about interviews. All that cool stuff that we loved doing or we did so feverishly all those years ago. Yeah,
SPEAKER_01:well, we still
SPEAKER_02:do it a lot. We still. It's part of our DNA and how we work. But, you know, this is, again, it's part of her DNA. Yeah. And it's the way she works. So there's a lot of stuff that she used. And I don't know whether she's applied any of it to her photography and her thinking with her subjects and that kind of stuff. My feeling is the photography is the exact opposite of everything she does at work. And her art and the book writing, all that kind of stuff, is the exact opposite of... the way most people think.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, you want that, I think.
SPEAKER_02:You want the relief. Yeah. Anyway, let's let these people head off and listen to Leanne. Okay, yep. And we'll catch you on the flip side. Good morning, Leanne.
SPEAKER_00:Good morning, Paul. How are you?
SPEAKER_02:I'm fine, thank you. We're sitting here together in my office, another lucky pandemic-safe place I saw Leanne's face drop because here in South Australia today we've just been announced that there's a cluster of COVID cases in the northern suburbs which has got us all a little bit anxious. So listeners, please forgive us if we both are a little bit what's going on here today. We're a safe distance. Would you agree? I haven't got the tape measure out. No, we are. We're a safe distance. And I've asked Leanne McPhee to come and chat because Leanne's just written and had published a book on the alternative photographic process. And the work that Leanne has been doing is beautiful, but it's another thing to then go and write a book for everybody else to take this on. It's another level of dedication and involvement and understanding of the process. So this is why she's an absolutely perfect guest. So welcome Leanne.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. I was going to add to that potentially madness
SPEAKER_02:as well. Well, I think everybody who plays with silver nitrate has a degree of madness in their veins. You know, whether it be the metaphorical idea of trying to take pictures and chasing things around and loving cameras. But chemistry is a weird thing to be in love with. Why are you the chemistry nerd?
SPEAKER_00:I don't know. And I don't know if I'd call myself a chemistry nerd, but it's just... Chemistry is part of doing this. If you want to experiment with the process, you need to understand what you're doing so you don't harm yourself or others. Or as I've done once, just said, everyone out of the house. Oh, really? Yeah, because it was just something that was– it just didn't mix well together and I'd poured them together into a container. But I think with chrysotype I was just– and even with salt printing, your reference to silver nitrate– I'm just curious about how you can tinker with it and how you can stretch it and create something different. Like with chrysotype, there's particular ways of using it to get a colour. And so I was wanting to see if I could mess with that a little bit and get different types of split tones or different colours. So... Understanding the chemistry, I've gone off and done a little course at RMIT just to help me do the calculations and so forth, but I've really relied on Dr Mike Ware, who is actually the creator of the chrysotype process, and he's a chemist and a photographer.
SPEAKER_02:When was chrysotype first discovered? Because at the same time as Fox Talbot's salt printing, when the idea came about... when they were sort of searching for metals that would hold image permanence. Is that right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. It was actually– Herschel really wanted to have coloured prints and so he was messing about with– Full
SPEAKER_02:colour we're talking about?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, he wanted colour because he'd seen sort of black and white, I guess, or the darkish tones of what Talbot was doing and he– I guess it was brown and white tones but he wanted colour– And so he was working with the photosensitive materials of plants, which are now called anthotypes today. And I don't think he was getting what he wanted then. And then he started working with gold because he knew that with gold you could get colour. And I think he was informed a little bit by a woman called Elizabeth Fulhame who had, I think it was 1794... was the first person to, I guess, create a photochemical reaction by using gold and silver salts, and she was dyeing cloth. And that's when she worked out that she was getting these purpley-red colours. So Herschel was informed by that research, and I think it was 1842 he coined chrysotype process. And chrys
SPEAKER_02:is Greek for gold, is that right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. And so just thinking about what he was doing at that time. So he was using this brown iron and it was sort of a gunky iron and he was finding that the gold was really reactive with the iron. And so he'd coat the paper with the iron and then he'd pop it into a bath of gold. So it was one shot. So you can imagine how expensive that was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that probably accounts for why he only did about, I think it was 31 prints all up and different specimens. And so what happened was he sort of left that as a bit of a process because it wasn't that successful at the time. He was getting a lot of fogging, like irrational sort of erratic colours were coming up. He couldn't get any consistency. And it was really contrasty. So I think it was about 100 and how many years later? This
SPEAKER_02:is when
SPEAKER_00:Mark. Yeah, something around the years. Mike Ware was working with platinotype, platinum and palladium. And him and Pradit Mald were working on just making that more usable. And so he turned his attention to chrysotype. and he worked out a way to have the gold not be so reactive with the iron. I see.
SPEAKER_02:So this is why Mike's work is so important to the process because whilst it was monkeyed around with and, you know, 100 years ago, whatever was understood in the search for that ideal reactive metal for capturing the latent image, the photograph, it wasn't until Mike got to– got a hold of it that he actually nailed it down with all the history of chemistry and understanding of the way silver's been used.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, well, yeah, it was the way that gold can be used. So he found a way to– he tested– different irons and different golds and found a good combination, but it was still reactive. So what he needed was a ligand, which is a bit of a binder. And so it allowed for you just to use it, to not have to have a gold bath, but just be able to coat the paper. So the modern day chrysotype is a three-stock formula. Right. So gold gives you your colour.
SPEAKER_02:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:And iron is your sensitiser. And the ligand is the binder, which makes it work together, but also controls the contrast of the print. Right. So, yeah, that's what
SPEAKER_02:– Well, let's go back to the– silver was chosen originally because it reacted so fast to light. It was a rapid– silver nitrate was developed because it was a rapid reaction to light, therefore it could be used in camera– What we're talking about now and following the whole Fox Talbot line is, okay, you want to make a paper print. And, of course, back in the day it was paper in the camera. But we are talking about, you know, contact printing mostly, isn't it? So you're working from a negative and you're talking about coating a paper that you're then exposing with light. Now, is that because the crystallotype process has such a low– iso it's it's not very sensitive to light that it works best in this process
SPEAKER_00:um it is just referred to as a contact printing process it's a completely different you can
SPEAKER_02:put in camera though can't you no you can't no
SPEAKER_00:okay so it is a gold and iron based uh contact printout process rather than a develop our process and uh so the size of your negative is the size of the image that you produce and the image uh prints out upon exposure to uv light
SPEAKER_02:Okay. So no one's developed a way of projecting the image onto the paper as yet? No. No. I'm
SPEAKER_00:not sure about that. I don't know who's tinkering away at what, but yeah. You
SPEAKER_02:think about the idea of enlarging is a challenge because if you've got to produce a negative that you want with all the rich detail and that kind of thing, you kind of need to expose a large negative. Right. So it gets you into the large format photography world to create big negatives and then to do this effective contact printing, which is complicated.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean it needs ultraviolet light to actually bring about that chemical reaction. And so with chrysotype you have a range of colours that are pink, reddy pink, violet, and you get into browns and purple, blue, green, grey and black colours And, you know, I guess having a little bit of understanding about how the gold works, you know, the gold in this is called nanoparticle gold. It's like little microscopic colloids of gold and the colour is determined by the shape and the size of the gold. And that in the chrysotype process is influenced by the humidity in the sensitised paper before it's exposed to UV light. Yes. Also the sizing agent used in the paper. Yes. And also the developing agent or the acid used in the first bath during the wet process. So going back to the colours I described, when you think of a pink or a violet... you achieve that by reducing the humidity in your paper. So that's called the low humidity range. And so that's around like nine. So is it
SPEAKER_02:moisture content?
SPEAKER_00:Moisture content. So moisture plays a big role in actually producing a printout.
SPEAKER_02:So are you using a device to sample the moisture content like a soil tester?
UNKNOWN:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:Sort of, but I can get to that. Yeah, righto. So if you think of that colour range, pinks is down the low end, so around 9% to 12%. And as you're moving up into your purples, you're in an intermediate range, so you're around 45%. And then as the humidity increases, you're looking at getting blues up in about 70% and then greys at 80% and blacks around 80%, 85%. So is it just
SPEAKER_02:sodden with... the sizing. Is that what we're talking about when you say humidity? It's
SPEAKER_00:the humidity in the air. Oh. Yeah, it's the humidity in the air.
SPEAKER_02:So you've got to go into a place where you store your cigars.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, or you can control it by using just a cat litter box. Oh,
SPEAKER_02:right. Now I can see what's going on.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so the colour is actually different. You're not making it sound easy, Leanne. I'm not. I guess what I'm, you know, we're getting into the technical side when you're talking about the chemistry, but if you just talk about, look, how do you create a print, right? Yeah. So you've got your three-stock solution, you mix that together
SPEAKER_02:and
SPEAKER_00:then you get a syringe that doesn't have a needle in it and you draw up a tiny amount of that. You put it across the top of your paper and the easiest way to spread that and the most economical is by using a glass puddle pusher. It's just a glass rod. So you coat your paper up and down five, six times. You just leave that to dry. You can leave it to dry.
SPEAKER_02:Getting that even though is a challenge?
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:It can be a little bit of tween. If it's really, really– you're in a dry area, a dry zone, low humidity, you can use a little bit of what's called tween and it just helps the even spread of the paper. You know the foam that's underneath your ironing board? Yep. Yep, put that down. Underneath, put your paper on top and you can get a really even coat. I see, yeah, yeah. I find with– I get a better, more even coat and a better image when I use a glass spreading rod.
SPEAKER_02:And the paper you're describing, it can be any open etching paper, like a traditional art paper that you might paint watercolours onto and the like, is that correct?
SPEAKER_00:Yep, 100% cotton watercolour paper is the best because you don't want any impurities in it that might react with the iron or the gold. So once you coat your paper... If you want like a pink image, it's monochrome, so it's pink and white, something which is like on the cover of the chrysotype book. So you know you've got to reduce the humidity. in that and you know that you'll get pink when it's around say 10% humidity how are you going to do that if you're in your room temperature and your humidity is you know it's high or if you bought a hygrometer which shows you what that humidity is alright it's 56 at the moment I need to get this down low so there's a couple of ways you can do that you can dry the hell out of it with a hair dryer back and front sort of have a bit of an understanding of okay that's taking moisture out. Or you can go and get yourself a cat litter box and an acrylic lid cut to size and some bulldog clips. And in the base of that, you'll pop– there's a range of salts that can draw out the humidity in the paper. And so what you do is you have some magnetic strips on the lid of the– humidity chamber as it's called, your paper gets clipped into that and then it goes face down to face over those salts. And so we know that if you leave that for between an hour at a minimum to two hours, that will draw out all the moisture. And you can pop your hygrometer in there and you can go, okay, yep, check that, I know what I've got. So then you take it out in the sun or if you've got a UV light box, you... before you actually pop it into there, you take your paper out, you've got something called a contact printing frame. So it's just like a huge, sort of think of it as a huge photo frame with a piece of glass in it. You've got your negative in there, emulsion side facing up and then you pop the paper with the sensitised side down on top of the negative and then you put the back on it and lock it in, turn it around and put it out in the sun or in your UV light box. And so we know with chrysotype, when you're trying to get pink and you've got a low humidity piece of paper, it's got less water in it, that you just need to expose it to see the shadow areas. Yeah. And then you whip it out. You pop it over some steam, which can be anything from boiled water in another cat litter tray. You hold it over there and the purpose of the steam is that it actually prints out more of the image and gives a really wonderful length and tonal range. And then you take it into your first bath, which might have oxalic acid, which is great for pinks, or citric acid, or... You can have tartaric acid or something called EDT– sorry, disodium EDTA. So those are the four common acids you use. And then in that bath, you can see the colour coming out. And if you haven't left it too long steaming, there's a bit of a trick with knowing how long to steam for. And you get a rhythm after a couple of stuff-ups. You know what you're doing. Yeah. And, yeah, you just take it through the wet process. And so it takes around an hour to two hours to do a print. Depending on if you're using a hairdryer, that's a lot quicker to reduce the humidity in the print.
SPEAKER_02:How would you describe– because everyone's listening and they're not looking at this on the web, but we'll have links to Leanne's– book and images and all that kind of stuff how would you describe a chrysotype image because it is mono monochrome in that it's single color and white right so how would you describe the look of it
SPEAKER_00:it has a lovely matte finish and it's um can be one of those range of colors that i described um but it's always usually monochromatic or it can be a split tone where you'll see lovely sort of pinks in the shadows and a light blue or a slate blue in the highlights. So they usually have not quite a long... as long tonal range as like a salt print, if you've ever seen a salt print, and the beautiful length of the tones in those images. So yeah, it's not, people describe it as non-literal colour, like it's not like your super bright pinks or your primary colours, but it's just a lovely matte finish with a monochromatic finish. purple, blue and white.
SPEAKER_02:So I think they're beautifully muted and pastel and very delicate looking. And yet the process, they're not delicate and non-durable in any way. Like these are... prints forever.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, they are. Yeah, completely archival.
SPEAKER_02:We're so used to photographic processes and discussions of archivalness and all that sort of thing. There's very few processes that actually generate something which is, you know, something forever for generations, providing the paper survives.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. You know? I think you hit the nail on the head. They are muted tones, but I've seen people use them, especially like the blacks and the blues, to make them really contrasty and... But I think with the way I use it, they do look a lot more delicate and muted and that lovely matte finish, unless you gelatin size it and want it to look a bit shinier.
SPEAKER_02:It's a very unique instrument if you think about the metaphor of music. And you're kind of writing, it's nice to write the music to suit the instrument rather than create some sort of a jarring effect. So with the art and the work that you're doing on it, What are you thinking about when you're creating pieces for it? Or are you just trying to get over the process and understand the process and to use it the best? Is that what you're tackling with your art?
SPEAKER_00:Well, no. I think... I started working with still life forms, which I couldn't believe because I usually get out with my camera. But because I was interested in these processes and I started off with salt printing, I started working with material because it was quiet and contemplative and just kept me out of the heat when I started working on them. And I was using the brown and the white of the salt print and it just wasn't working. And I wanted to find a process that, I guess, worked with my concepts, the intent to be able to convey what I was sort of seeing and wanted to see and feel with the work. And with the drapery, it sort of... has this inherent personality and you can work with it. And it can just be recalcitrant. It just won't work with you. And that one there, I just, you know, I threw over, I just cracked the shits completely and just threw it over the rack and it just started falling down. And I'm like, click, and I'm grabbing pegs and holding it in place. It wouldn't be
SPEAKER_02:told.
SPEAKER_00:It had to do its own thing. Yeah, it had to do its own thing. So when I was working with the material itself, it was delicate and I wanted a process that spoke to that. And when I was introducing... pieces of vase or smashing up vases or how we've seen in history drape represented. It's usually the background of an image with people laying in it or other artefacts.
SPEAKER_02:You think neoclassical, Roman, you think biblical stories, you think goddesses lying around and that kind of thing. That's where drapery is being used.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. And I always, when I was looking at those images, I was fortunate to be in Rome one year and just visiting the galleries and I wouldn't see the people, I would see the material because there's something quite calming about that for me and obviously that's what I needed in my life at that point in time to calm the business down and I think that's really reflected in a lot of my work. And so the funny thing was I had a clipping of... An image that had this pink and slate colour in it and I thought, oh, that's an interesting way of toning a silver gelatin print. And I had moved and I was setting up and doing the drapery and I found the clipping in a box and it just so happened I'd been to Gold Street Studios in Victoria. Wonderful, yeah. And I'd been... taking some of the issues I had with salt printing there. And Mike Ware was actually in Australia doing some workshops. And the funny thing was I saw chrysotype and I thought, oh, what's that? And I saw platinotype and I thought, well, that's what I want to do. I want to love those tones. It's amazing. And I can combine that with cyanotype and... and it was just by chance that I actually decided to do the chrysotite workshop there and as I was working with a couple of negatives I thought this is the process I need to bring out that feeling that I want other people to see when they look at the what I'm seeing as I'm hanging these drapery over the rack to evoke this sort of calmness you know pink has a calm and even when I've used the black of chrysotype it just has this striking strength you know the silent drapery hanging there, but it has this sort of crusader feel to it. And so that's why I started working with this process because it helped me convey my concept and then I got hooked on the process as well.
SPEAKER_02:Because it is a big leap to try something out for your practice than to go and write the book. I think this will actually be the book, won't it? Because Mike hasn't written the book yet.
SPEAKER_00:Mike has written... But
SPEAKER_02:not the book.
SPEAKER_00:Not the book. He's actually written the history and he's written a manual and that was... very scientific based and great for conservators and people who want to understand the chemistry and probably a little bit of what I banged on about earlier that people might be scratching their heads thinking, what the is that? Trust me, if you're interested in this and you have a look online and you have a look at the book. Oh, it's a rabbit hole,
SPEAKER_02:isn't
SPEAKER_00:it? Yeah. I've made sure it's as simple as possible. I've got the shortcut one. I just want to bloody print this, Leanne. Okay, here's this way of doing it. Save you getting phone calls. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_02:Page 27.
SPEAKER_00:Page 27, yep. And if you want to dig in like I did and go, what happens when I do this, when I try vinegar in the first developing bath or, you know, what does it look like if I don't try that, if I don't use any chemical in there and And so the book goes into that as well. So it's something you can experiment with. So there was nine years in between me going, right, I can actually– this works for what I'm wanting to do with drape. And it took me– because I was also learning large format at the time. I was learning everything, making a ton of mistakes and that's– Keep note of all your mistakes because that might end up in a book one day. Right, right.
SPEAKER_02:So that scientific methodology of writing what you're doing, I mean it's important when you– as soon as you pull a view camera out, 5, 4, 10 out or whatever it might be, you really have to– try and remember exactly what you do. You don't know what double dark you've exposed. You have to be quite scientific about it. So that is what led to all of this, the notes and everything you took.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I started taking notes. I've got a research background and also a bad memory. So I knew that I had to write this stuff down because you have to do that to reproduce prints. You've got to know what the humidity is and all the rest of it. So... Ellie, who's the director of Gold Street Studios, she acknowledged my curiosity and my 18,000 questions I'd ask her a month and kindly obliged me and would answer those or just what I was thinking about at the time. And she said, I have a symposium. She runs a symposium every second year, invites people from overseas and has local people present as well. And she said, oh, come and present some of your work. And I thought, oh, it was that moment of, do they just want to see like the 10, 15 prints that I've done? Is that enough? Are they going to be interested in that? And so I thought, maybe they might be interested in other ways that you can, you know, reduce the humidity in the paper. Or maybe I should just give a bit of an outline of what this is in the plainest way possible. Because at the time it was, you know, it's, you can probably hear it's quite a challenging process. And there was a scientific, I guess, procedure written in the first place. I've written it more for practitioners. So I went to this conference and presented. And the keynote speaker there was Christina Zed Anderson, who is a professor of photography at Montana University in Bozeman in the US. And she walked in and she looked up and she said, I'm going to buy that. I like that print. And she said hello to me and then walked to a seat and I'm looking up there and I'm going, that's my print. She's putting out my print. Isn't that lovely? And then I did my presentation and she just came up to me boldly and said, I think you should write a manual. In fact, I think you should do a book. Everyone else here is doing PhDs in photography, so why don't you do that? I think you need to write this because it was really clearly articulated and everyone is quite interested. And I'm like, oh, okay. That sounds like a challenge. It was a challenge. And every six months she'd come back and say, ready to write a manual? Ready to write a book? And I think she at the time knew she had something going on behind the scenes in that she is a series editor of– this is one of nine books in the Contemporary Practices series for which Christina is the actual series editor. And she had a deal with Routledge Publishing and– So then she had a chat to, I was, you know, in the meantime, I think that was what, 2013? And I was still tinkering away, testing, making, you know, tons of mistakes and And, yeah, so she talked to Mike Ware and said, who do you think should write a Chris-type book for the series?
SPEAKER_02:He looked who'd ask the most questions.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and he said, I think you need to ask Leanne. Because I was also, you know, I was asking Ellie, you know, 18,000 questions or 1,800 questions. Can you imagine how many I was asking Mike? Yeah. Why is this happening? Because I just made every mistake or weird things would happen. Yeah. So Christina formally approached me and I just said, yeah, why not? And then closed off the computer and went, what did I just do? It was like just a natural thing. I thought, I've written a thesis before. How do they know if I actually can write well? Obviously the
SPEAKER_02:presentation was enough.
SPEAKER_00:I think they'd done a few Google things on, I don't know. some strategic reports or whatever I'd written or posts or, yeah. So that, yeah, it was three years ago. I wrote the proposal and the chapter and sent it off and that was
SPEAKER_02:it. So three years it took you to put the book together?
SPEAKER_00:It did because I was given, I think it was nine months to actually do the writing and then I had to stop start just due to some family health issues. So I had the proposal accepted, I think it was the start of 2018 and then waited a while for the contract and I thought I might just get ahead of the game and start writing a few chapters. And then the later half of 2018 and... probably half of 2019 were just blown out of the water. Wow. So I come back to– and they were– I just have to say they were fantastic in letting me have that time so I could just focus on one thing or two things instead of seven. Yeah. And, yeah, so it was– September was the last time I looked at the manuscript and the full– the full kit and caboodle and gave the sign off on that and then here it is
SPEAKER_02:yeah it's amazing i've ordered my copy it hasn't rocked up yet i'm i'm really keen to um to sit down and pour over tell me is it a process you know some processes like cyanotype you can you can just go and do for sport but there's some processes require such cleanliness and care through each stage And sometimes it's just down to, well, what are you trying to get out the end? If you want perfection out the end, you then need to be very careful from the word go. Is it a process that's accessible– that's the right word, yeah– accessible just to a rough worker?
SPEAKER_00:I would say yes. I think some people would say no because you're working with gold and, you know, it's– It's not a cheap process, although you're only using a very little bit.
SPEAKER_02:Because silver nitrate with wet plate work is quite expensive. Is it equivalent to silver nitrate costs?
SPEAKER_00:It's a little bit more expensive, but not as much as platinum or palladium. And, of course, we're in a recession at the moment, so Nobel medals go up. So gold is a little bit more expensive. But, you know, I think I use for 35 mil– of gold solution I get about 98 by 10 prints and look you can you can be rough you can be as perfectionist if you know if you want to and I think if you're being a perfectionist it means you're trying to print you know five of the same and expecting the same color to come out or you can just go for it and go wow look at that look what color that came out and I'll I'll try and do that again I'll remember I might do that in a day and I know that you know that greenish color really works for this print or I might just try it with another negative but you know something like cyanotype you can just that's for everyone but I think that it's worthwhile doing cyanotype and you know maybe Van Dyke Brown or something else before you start doing chrysotype because it's got a you know it's got 10-15 more steps in it than what producing cyanotype has
SPEAKER_02:yeah well that makes sense I think one of the charms of And one of the allures of this sort of a thing is photography has often suffered, always suffered from this idea that, oh, we just make another copy. We're not making one-offs. Whereas Chrisotype is very much in that step towards this is a unique thing that I've made and it's a one-off. And it's silly to think this way, but I think photographers have this chip on their shoulder about that. And I think... Galleries have not been supportive over the years. I think it's very different now, but even go back 10 years, galleries would be very critical of, oh, I don't want photography, it's just photography. This is another step, though. It is definitely another step in the direction of working where you are creating a single unique piece that might not be reproducible. I mean, you can scan a watercolour. And that's really exciting. I think that's one of the beauties of it. When I was looking at your work, when I first started seeing it, before I knew you were writing a book or anything, to me it had this feeling like when you see a sculpture done in marble, and I'm not talking about the classical and the neoclassical feel of what a marble sculptor is about, but it's about that monotone feeling, whereas they convey everything. fabrics, drapery, translucency with marble. A great sculptor can do that. The end result, though, is still it's all in marble and it's this thing that's got its own magic to it. I think in many ways Chrysotype has that feeling to it. Would you think that's a pretty reasonable kind of a parallel in some ways? It's probably as hard as marble to get perfect. At any rate, to get perfect.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, nothing is ever perfect, I think. But, yeah, I think that's a pretty good description. Yeah, it's a pretty good description of it. But you can also take it a different way depending on what you're doing with your particular imagery. I've seen it done with really gothic-looking statues or just people with portraits of people on the street. And they've gone with a grey sort of black or dark blue tone. That's worked really well with that. I've seen it used very experimentally. So it looks like flecks of different colour. And it looks more graffiti-like, really. Aged graffiti. Yeah, yeah. So I think it... It just depends. I mean, you talked about it being chrysotype in terms of the colours are muted and delicate. And myself and another artist, Wendy Curry, have picked up on that for the concepts that we've had. Hers around the memory of her mother's jewellery and so forth and gloves and those beaded purses. And she's used predominantly... the purple, the pink and the pink split tones and that's worked really well and it's worked well for my concept. Yeah, drapery. Yeah, but with some of my street scenes, I would probably go up to get the blues and the dark purples and something like that to make it a bit grittier.
SPEAKER_02:So let's go back. Where did photography begin in your interest in art? Was photography the first thing that...
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. How long ago?
SPEAKER_00:How old were you? It's funny when you ask that question because it just conjured up what my first image was and it was chasing goannas. Right. Chasing goannas.
SPEAKER_02:Poor goannas. You know we're not allowed to chase them so much, don't you?
SPEAKER_00:That's how I got started in photography. No, it was one goanna in particular. It was my first image and I was around 11 or 12 and I had worked out that I just wanted to create tangible memories of what I was seeing. And I love the play of light on landscapes. And I knew that my parents were kind of ahead of their time in that they were minimalists already back then. And to want to purchase something, you had to really explain it and justify it and whatnot. And for me, wanting a camera, wanting to photograph was something that was just deep inside me. It was just a feeling I had to do it. And so, you know, presenting that to my parents was just not going to fly. They weren't like that. They couldn't understand this, you know, deep-seated feeling of I just have to photograph. I need a camera to do
SPEAKER_02:that. So were they scientists or were they
SPEAKER_00:science background? No, my dad... They're logical. They don't have science backgrounds. Mum's probably got more of the artistic vein on her side of the family. Dad's more mathematical. We're not science-y people at all. I've not studied science or anything like that. So I saved up some birthday and Christmas money and I asked my auntie if she'd buy it for me as a Christmas present that year. Sneaky shit. Very good. Thank you, auntie. I had my workarounds at 12. That's a sign of
SPEAKER_02:intelligence, you know. Is it? Okay. Like me. Cheeky cheating as a kid, I think it's one of the biggest signs of intelligence. You can work your way around the adult system.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Which is
SPEAKER_02:generally wrong and sucks anyway.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. But my auntie was always supportive of things that either didn't, you know, sounded a bit left of centre or just, you know. So she did that for me and we did our usual Christmas gathering from Woodrow. And we did that down the river and we had the ute and halfway through when it was getting boring, us kids would get in the back. And anyway, I was in there with my$90 Kodak camera, compact camera from Target. I'd seen it in the catalogue and I was like, that'll do. And I was in the back of the car and my cousin said, hey, look at that goanna. Look at those goannas. There was a couple, but there's one that was just about to make its way up the tree and it was humongous and there's big talons on it. And I quickly put my camera up to my eye and I'm like, oh, I can't really see it that well. I have to get out of the car. And so with the camera to my eye, I remember I just stuck my foot on the edge and I just heard, Leanne! And I just flew out of the car. And I wasn't going very fast, like 10K or something like that. But that was just, you know, the instinct, I have to get this picture. So I'm running after this goanna as it's running up the tree, which is not a wise thing to do. But at 12 and, you know, with that spirit of I have to take this photograph, I did it. So I took it and I remember just these talons and it's sort of like stopping and looking at me and I'm thinking, oh crap, better go. So this one 6x4 image of the goanna that you sort of have to lean into the image to see because it's very small, I took centre stage on the photo album, my first photo album. So that's how I remember chasing this goanna was the first shot I took and then I realised that You know, there's something to be said for an SLR and... particular lenses and I wanted to continue with photography, doing something serious about it but I ended up going, I wanted to be a lawyer so I went to uni and worked out quickly that wasn't really for me but I was interested in what makes people tick. So I was interested in the criminology aspect. Criminology. Yeah and so I'd still, you know, at Flinders and Melbourne Uni I'd still go to the the camera club there and develop my black and white film and whatnot. And I was here in Adelaide and finished, started working, and I just thought, you know, I really want to improve the technicality. I want to improve what I'm seeing and what translates onto paper. But I didn't want to go back to uni. And so I did a short course at what was Adelaide School of Photography then.
UNKNOWN:Yes, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Jim Fenimore. And then I came across the CCP, the good old CCP, the Centre for Creative Photography. And you know how it goes. You do a workshop there and you do a course. It's a drug. Yep. A couple of years later, you get a diploma. And it was really through, I think it was Darkroom 2, where you get to use the different developers and
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:To create a particular aesthetic or see what changes in contrast you can achieve. And that's where that bug bit. And I remember having all the different– the prints laid out and seeing the subtle changes in colour. And that's when I became really curious about just what can you do if you do this or if you mix a bit of that. Yeah. and doing cyanotype and polaroid transfers at the CCP and then I got curious about salt printing and that's how I got into it now. Yeah, that's normally the
SPEAKER_02:gateway drug, isn't
SPEAKER_00:it? Yeah, it is the gateway drug, yeah. Well, cyanotype is. Yes, you're right. That is for the average.
SPEAKER_02:But I think the cyanotype almost skips photography for a lot of people. You don't even have to be interested in photography to have fun with cyanotype. And I think that's the other way in for it. But I find, for me personally, it's been the idea of photography has been such an industrialised thing that is bought and given to us. And there's this backdoor that you can get by having some glassware and some... some base chemicals which are the same things that the people right back in the beginning were playing with and i think that's a really exciting side of it uh and anytime you get a chance to sort of get back to that i think a lot of photographers find quite refreshed about their their process of taking and making you know pictures and prints and that kind of stuff because they feel like they're touching on the history of what what began it for them uh so let's get back to you the The criminology lawyer gave up being a lawyer. Was that because you worked out being a criminal was better?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. More money in it? And as you can see, when I was 12, I was a little bit of a deviant, so yeah. Well, a good kind of deviant. No, why was I interested in the law? I was interested in the social justice aspect, really. Right. Fairly representing people. And I think after my first year, I sort of worked out... Yeah, the rose-coloured glasses are off now. Actually, what I'm seeing, what this will be like, and I think I was doing contract law at that point in time, so I was like, hmm, a bit dry. It's
SPEAKER_02:a process, isn't
SPEAKER_00:it? Yeah, yeah. And I was more interested in, I guess, looking at political environments or just social environments and seeing how that impacted on people and the way they lived and... know how that brought about certain circumstances and i was just interested in what made people tickle what how they made sense of their world and i guess i see that in a little bit of my photography as well how i'm making sense of the world if i'm my head's really busy and i'm looking at you know playing around with drapes and and or you know taking pictures of the um you the broke statues and the Thai statues I did for representations in modern life. And that was just the calming, the quiet effect. So with the criminology, I was really looking at that from the angle of social justice.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and perhaps why people ended up in that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, in those situations.
SPEAKER_02:So on one of the websites that you featured, it mentions you as a senior social innovator. What does that mean? I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:I work for the Australian Centre for Social Innovation. So social innovation can be looked at in a number of different ways in terms of what does it mean, but it's really about how we can do differently and better and make the solutions more sustainable. So whether you're looking at service design or you're looking at policies that are written, how we can do differently so it actually supports the people for whom They are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're there for. So, you know, social innovation is a thing where we have particular approaches that we use to redesign services or, you know, look at systems change. But at the heart of it, it's really about people with lived experience. And so we use this approach called co-design. And it can be seen as just like a way of engaging people in a process to get their opinion. But co-design is really about... working alongside people who have particular experiences, working with and for them to actually work towards opportunities where we can create change or make solutions to a particular social issue.
SPEAKER_02:So it's almost the opposite of surveying. You're not sending people something to fill out. You're observing, you're discussing, you're interviewing people. Working
SPEAKER_00:with them, we're prototyping, live prototyping. Three disability services got together and wanted to improve their service. So we were doing live prototypes with their workers and with clients on a new service. So you're in the thick of it.
SPEAKER_02:It's design-led innovation, isn't it really? So how frustrated must you be at the rise of conservatism today? Like, I'm sorry, this is not a political podcast, but I'm always fascinated, and Kate and I struggle with the idea that people want to wind the clock back. I mean, here's the person who's doing a chemical process, photochemical process, but this is obviously... The photochemical process is a reaction to your frustration with the current world. But, I mean, how frustrating it is that people just want to think what was told to us as stories in the past was... the way things should be now, you know, and we shouldn't be listening to people like yourself doing research, looking at the problems and creating solutions, trying them out, finding them no doubt working but not being able to perhaps implement. Does that implementation stuff frustrate you? Yeah, it
SPEAKER_00:can be frustrating. I mean it depends on what you're trying to implement and I also love the challenge of it, you know, and I don't There's no one way of doing it. When you're talking about getting one side of the story, there's always two sides or many sides to the story. And so to be able to implement something appropriately, you need to understand what those stories are. It's when you're coming up against the immune response of the system, of that one story or that one dominant perspective, which is, it is frustrating and it can make implementation impossible or put it off for years. So what is a good idea or a good prototype? You know, sometimes you need the stars aligned to be able to implement and scale that. You know, with... things even politically um you know if the climate is right you think you know how did that person get in or how did that initiative get on the ground luck and sometimes it's luck and just timing be able to pick the timing and being ready to go so as i'm talking through it yeah it does frustrate me but it's it's i like the challenge yeah you know in different facets of my life i like the challenge
SPEAKER_02:we're very lucky that you've got that attitude you know the world is australia is and south australia is you know lucky that people like yourselves aren't giving up on things just because it is hard. It's funny, I was speaking to a professor at the Adelaide University who specialises in photography and imaging and I was always surprised at how far he seemed behind what the working world understood as being normal and the way things work. And it had to be because science has to see the proof and then the the thesis written, discussed, pulled apart before it gets adopted, which is good because we don't want to rush off doing something dopey. So in some ways we're frustrated at our own process because it's what science is, what is making
SPEAKER_00:all this work. It's the constraints that we've given ourselves. I mean, when you think of vaccines, though, you really do want it to be scientific and you want it to be working. But as you were saying that, I was thinking sometimes people will– when I say something which isn't you know, scientific or has a particular methodology attached they're like oh really you you think you know like you don't have to do a survey that is statistically valid um in fact you're probably not going to really get into the depths of what that actual issue is by surveying you know 3 000 people but i can guarantee you if you spend um half a day you know talking with someone with lived experience of either mental health or um who's living with disability and trying to navigate the NDIS and understand the different policies of the NDIA. you get that tacit information, that hidden deeper knowledge that gives you far more insight into what the issue is, what's making people tick, and potentially what you can do to challenge that, to provide an opportunity or a solution. So I'm not one for surveys. Quantitative research has its place, but so does qualitative. I love the work that I do in that I can use some of my photography, I can use images for photo elicitation where you have images in front of someone and it gets the conversation going and an image might unpack a memory for them or something deep and they're able to tell you about that experience or where you give someone a camera and you teach them how to use it but they go out and record what's happening in their community and that gives you insight that way or sometimes people use that information as evidence of what's happening so photography as a community development practice is something that I'm really interested in and, you know, to some degrees I've been able to use it in my work with Taxi as well.
SPEAKER_02:I think if you imagine that none of us are really, very few of us are trained journalists, so whatever tool we use to tell our story is going to be biased to our story. So that's exactly what's happening that you're finding with photography. That's really interesting.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's going to be biased to it or it might help us question what we're seeing. Yeah. And sometimes people take pictures and they're not connected with it. And they say, no, no, no, that's not what I meant. But as you're discussing it, you're getting into deeply what it is they actually were feeling about that place or what their experience was in that community where they were taking the photo.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's fascinating. I was looking at your website, looking at some of the other work you've done that's not around alternative process. And it's a bit of street for And is that all wrapped in the social justice interest? I
SPEAKER_00:think in people. In people. The interest in people. The... The street photography is the opposite of what I do with a large format and what some people would say the tedious process. It's grabbing the toy camera. I've got a digital holger and I've got a film holger and get out there with some friends, with my husband or just by myself and take pictures of either people, their whole, but I like taking just segments and just thinking what does that convey about them and their interaction with the environment. whether it's down the mall or at the beach or something like that. I also don't like taking, you know... pictures of people exposing their face so you know who they are. I don't feel comfortable with that so it's usually segments of them like their rings and their dress and what that might say about them. But there's something about the freeness of getting out there with a plastic camera and getting out into the environment as opposed to being at home in the lounge room with your set up and taking those photographs. So part of that is about me needing to get out in nature, get staying out in space, exploring, but also observing people. And I think with the Hidden Places, Hidden Lives, which was the project I did with four other or three other people, Adelaide artist and one of those, my good friend, Marcus Brownlow.
SPEAKER_02:Wonderful Marcus.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, a wonderful Marcus. Sue Michael and Jennifer Hoffman.
SPEAKER_02:Sue's work's great. There's a series she did on the Mid-North where she photographed the feeling you get when you're driving and the road is whizzing. by the corners of your eyes and you just get a feel of the change in colour as you go through wheat and greenery of forests and all that kind of stuff. She's really clever. And Marcus, that was a very successful little project, wasn't it? A good collaboration.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Actually, the name of the organisation, sorry, has escaped me. I've changed their name recently. But we work with the local councils also associated with supported residential accommodation facilities. Yes. So we work with three of those across Adelaide and we took in the Nikon cameras, the little toy cameras, I guess you'd say. Yeah,
SPEAKER_02:point-and-shoot
SPEAKER_00:digitals. Yeah, the point-and-shoot. Yeah, they were originally– made for kids I think but you know they're great cameras and so we did run a few sessions just you know basic how to use this camera let's go around and you know what do you like to take photos of and the idea was just to get an insight into where people were living what is a supported accommodation facility and the connection that they have with the community so we got a lot of I guess good insight into how people were living and what they enjoyed. And, you know, we ran up against some censorship issues. Of course, because they're not–
SPEAKER_02:as photographers they wouldn't be as aware of that and they would be trusted within their environment, which would give– better, more relevant images because as soon as you put yourself in there, you're changing the environment.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. So there was one where we wanted to understand what people were doing with their time and there was a shot that it wasn't explicit but you could work out that it was TV and they were watching some porn. But it was a reflection of... And that's what they did on a particular night during the week. So that was included after a lot of discussion about what censorship is and so forth with the organisers. And I think, you know, it was a great project with... Yeah, with the organisation and the local councils and the SRFs and the actual 12 other photographers who were leading that exhibition. And they took some wonderful work. So we got a great insight into their lives that we wouldn't otherwise have gotten.
SPEAKER_02:Have you guys kept up with any of those residents or...?
SPEAKER_00:We see some in a particular area out and about around the cafes and said hello a couple of times. This was six years ago but ironically through my work with Taxi I was working with the Hutt Street Centre and they were talking about this guy with this pink camera, this Nikon camera that keeps coming and I went... And I knew straight away who it was. And so they are doing– one aspect of their work is similar to what we did with Hidden Places, Hidden Lives. And so it was great to be able to work with them on that and, you know, just hear about this person who is still there and still taking photos. And that camera, that bloody camera is still working. That's a cheap camera,
SPEAKER_02:yeah. Yeah, I was– there's a couple of projects we've done over the years with groups and– I was involved with one with– I think that was Service to Youth, SYC, which is actually now just around the corner here. And there was 12 kids I think they gave– they're using disposable single-use cameras at the time. And it was over maybe a four- or five-month period where they were given the cameras to do the same sort of thing, photograph their lives. And then we had this huge exhibition. Massive prints were hanging in the railway station as a– part of it and it was funny in reviewing the results of it and I don't know if it was any way the objective of Hidden Places and Hidden Lives but it certainly was with this was to help these kids understand that what they were doing was worthwhile and their stories were worthwhile and the reports came back that a significant amount of them actually had found a place within a year or so of having this work and a talk about that work whether it be a place to live or a place to work or or they'd sort of found themselves on the track, the value of allowing people to tell their stories in their way is just huge.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it gives them voice and confidence and I guess an understanding. They're reflecting on their lives and reflecting on different circumstances. It can be deep, it can be not so deep, but it still provides... them and insight, more importantly. So to be able to go on and find particular accommodation and whatnot is fantastic.
SPEAKER_02:What a powerful little thing photography is, really. And look, it's storytelling, but it's so accessible. You don't need to have to be able to write. You don't have to write beautifully, but it can be used to tell these sorts of stories and help people feel heard and listened to, which is kind of beautiful how it fits in with your work, you must be a really lucky person to have both that work, social justice work lined up and your art practice is kind of following it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it feels like finally there's a synergy. I always thought I had the yin and the yang, the analytical and the creative and I guess with this latest work and with Chrysotype it is a combination of both the creative and the analytical but certainly with my work I can combine both and Yeah, I love it.
SPEAKER_02:Well, that's fabulous. Hey, that's our hour. I just wanted to congratulate you on your book and it is truly a beautiful tome and it is really important for all of us to have people like yourself who will muck with this stuff but to someone to actually work it out for us and write it down and go through a lot of the difficult things and give everyone a great head start into this fabulous little world that is an alternative process. So thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you very much. It's been great to have the chat with you. It's great.
SPEAKER_02:Good on you, Leanne. Keep up the great work.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you, Paul.
UNKNOWN:And welcome back, Kate.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you, Paul. I mean, I think to have so much knowledge in your head and so much tenacity to carefully go through and work out a process and then communicate that process to other people is a real trick.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. And the next trick is also to write the book on the whole thing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. It's very impressive.
SPEAKER_02:So listeners need to know the book is available for sale. Yes. And we'll have a link to where you can buy it from. And it's one of those things that would– it's really worth gracing your shelves if you do like collecting books on photography because it's got some lovely imagery in it but it's got some lovely techniques in it. And just to pick it up and– pick through it, even though you may never try Christotype, it just helps you understand all these different technologies and techniques. It's pretty awesome. But that, you mentioned tenacity to do this. You know, we're in this process of looking for staff, right? Because we've kind
SPEAKER_01:of had…
SPEAKER_02:Well, how do you test for tenacity when it comes to…
SPEAKER_01:No, I don't want to have to have tenacity to find the fucking person. Oh, you're going to
SPEAKER_02:have to need tenacity. Come on. How many applicants have you got already?
SPEAKER_01:I think we've got…
SPEAKER_02:Because you've done the whole thing. I think we've got 15. You've done the proper thing. We paid for SEEK. Yeah, I think… Paid the$300.
SPEAKER_01:I think we've got 15 from SEEK, including a woman who doesn't live in Australia. How does that work? And has a degree in chemical engineering. But you use the word lab and you get weird…
SPEAKER_02:Okay, right, yeah. Yeah. Because they think they're a lab lab people.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And they're
SPEAKER_02:not.
SPEAKER_01:No. And they just a bulk apply to anything with the word lab in it, I think. Yeah, yeah. So, no. But we have got some really good potential people in there. But the thing is what we're trying to get is we're trying to get a person who can work with two aspects of our business. Work with the pre-print and then the post-print. So, somebody who can… Work with colour on the screen and get the colour correction right,
SPEAKER_02:consistent. We're not expecting anyone to understand how to do this, but it's sort of an innate skill of understanding what needs to be done. And it's one of those things– there's a lot to be learned by doing it on the job. And we don't expect people to come with these skills.
SPEAKER_01:No, and it is a bit born– In them. Yeah. But this is where I was coming from the tenacity. They either can do it or they can't. This is where I was coming from. Yeah, but it's not tenacity because that's like you just hang on and you work it
SPEAKER_02:out. Being able to do it is one thing. The other thing is being able to do it regularly. Constantly. And to be able to happily do it.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. And to survive doing it. We had a staff member who wasn't bad at it, but he was like, I can't. I can't. It's too boring.
SPEAKER_02:Too many pictures, too many of the same pictures.
SPEAKER_01:Too boring and can't do it. And that's fine. Like everybody, I mean, I think all sorts of jobs are boring and so I don't do them and other people think they're fabulous. So that's just what it is. It's a matter of finding the right person for it. You know, like quilting. Like punch me in the face before I do a quilt. It is literally... You started though. Fuck me. It's the worst experience of my life. I will never, never, no, not going to happen. But, I mean, look at quilting. It's like... Millions of women, and let's face it, most of them are women, across the world quilt every day and think it's the best thing ever. They have bloody conferences about it. I just want to punch myself even thinking about
SPEAKER_02:it. And then we went to Pennsylvania to Amish country. And we bought an Amish quilt. And we sat and we saw the different fabrics and choices for quilting. It's amazing. Well, it's the same sort of thing. But, you know, you've got to
SPEAKER_01:have someone who's… Which
SPEAKER_02:is actually quite tricky.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it is. They're
SPEAKER_02:almost like a counter to each other, slow and careful and decisive.
SPEAKER_01:They almost don't come together. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Because sometimes it's an instinct job in some ways. Sometimes with colour correcting, well, actually not sometimes, all the time with colour correcting, the first instinct you feel about what needs to be done is right. The more you look at it, the more your brain accepts it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:and the more it looks right and the more you print it and test and test and print it. So it is tough. We are looking for someone who's interested in that kind of work for sure. But
SPEAKER_01:then also an ability to handle prints and be delicate with their hands. Like we can't have someone who, you know, like we have a staff member. No bulls in China shops. That's right. Who could probably do it. But she just thrashes. She's just too rough, like physically too rough. And that's not a gender thing at all. And you can't sweat
SPEAKER_02:too much because, you know.
SPEAKER_01:No. Well, that's like, you know, that's the thing with patisserie. Workers. Yeah. So patisserie chefs have to have cold hands. Really? Yeah. Do they have a
SPEAKER_02:warm heart?
SPEAKER_01:Something like that. But they're patisserie chefs, so they're like the scientific nerd freaks of cooking. But their fingers are
SPEAKER_02:cold.
SPEAKER_01:But they have to have cold hands because when you're handling butter and you want the butter to stay at a good temperature, if you've got these hot hands constantly handling it, it ruins the… But I've
SPEAKER_02:got hot hands and I'm really good at handling prints.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, but you would be a terrible patissier. Is that the word?
SPEAKER_02:I'd eat it all.
SPEAKER_01:You would eat it all, but it would melt first. Yes. Because you are basically a nuclear reactor of temperature.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I am. But we've had people working for us that have had to wear two pairs of gloves, you know, cotton gloves, to stop the sweat going through. Yeah, that's right. Isn't that weird? And it's pretty rare. And you
SPEAKER_01:can get Botox for that now.
SPEAKER_02:What?
SPEAKER_01:For like sweaty hands. Yes. But your fingers
SPEAKER_02:won't work then.
SPEAKER_01:No, no, no. They do it very carefully and they do it for underarms as well. Do
SPEAKER_02:your fingers get like all fat and without
SPEAKER_01:fingerprints? No, that's fillers, not Botox. Botox freezes. It doesn't fill.
SPEAKER_02:Can you feel with your fingers?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, you can still feel. It just kills the sweat glands, I think. In your hands. Yeah, they do it also in your armpits.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, I can imagine the armpits. So if you've got an armpit sweaty thing. It's maybe opening a bottle of beer if you're one of those people.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, really? Is that a thing men do?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, there's all funny places you can crack a beer
SPEAKER_01:at. Okay. Okay. That's enough. Because I know where you're going.
SPEAKER_02:Where am I going?
SPEAKER_01:They're already there in their imagination. You don't need to go there. Okay?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So, yeah, so there's a whole lot of crazy stuff you need to be able to do to handle and blah, blah, blah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so we need that magical creature. Well, yeah, realistically we need two of
SPEAKER_02:them. Has this work actually stopped or are we actually still producing? What do you mean? We've got enough people here to do this work but they're not getting much of a rest, are they?
SPEAKER_01:They're not getting much of a rest and a whole lot of strategic stuff that we need one of them in particular to be doing isn't happening.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, because
SPEAKER_01:she's… Because she's busy bloody correcting stuff. Yeah. So, yeah, we need to somehow find this magical person and I suspect we're going to plough through sort of ten people.
SPEAKER_02:We call them unicorns.
SPEAKER_01:Well, yes, but, you know. Are they
SPEAKER_02:magic as in David Copperfield?
SPEAKER_01:I think it's important to treat all of our staff as though they are unicorns, not just one at a time. They're a herd
SPEAKER_02:of unicorns.
SPEAKER_01:Then you get everybody's all pissy because they can't do colour and the colour girls just stand around going, we're the best and you're all losers, which we already have a bit of that going on. We've got people who
SPEAKER_02:are terrible with colour, but you give them, like, if all the benches were turned upside down, all the prints were on the ground, within half an hour that'll be in the nice little orders again, whereas the colour person might not be able to do that. They'll be like, wah. Yeah. That would be me. like I can't sort that stuff.
SPEAKER_01:Are you good with colour?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, no, not anymore. Actually, no. You know, interesting enough, I wasn't and I'm better now that I've been printing. I wouldn't say I've got my mojo back, but... my color vision and my confidence around it has improved. And I'm finding that Miriam is actually asking my opinion.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Whereas before she would, she would pretend to ask me.
SPEAKER_01:She's good like that. Yeah. I don't know. I'm terrible at it. I just, I think I'm so, um, like I could probably, I can look at something and go, geez, that seems red or that seems green or whatever. Um, But I find the fine stuff that they do. When they point it out, when they go, can you see how it's really blue here in the shadows and it's really yellow and that's crossover because goddamn Frontier is such a piece of shit. You can see it when it's pointed out. Yeah, exactly when it's pointed out. But to actually be the person that can do it, oh, my God.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's totally different. So a moment of colour.
SPEAKER_01:That was it.
SPEAKER_02:No, I meant a colour. It's the colour test for–
SPEAKER_01:I
SPEAKER_02:thought I'd talk about
SPEAKER_01:that. Yeah, the X-Rite.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I thought I'd talk about– What do they call it? The Munsell colour test.
SPEAKER_01:The what?
SPEAKER_02:Munsell. Wow. X-Rite is a company. Yes. They just seem to have bought everything to do with colour out. They're like the news limited of newspapers and– And what they've done is they've– one of the things they've bought is Munsell was a brand that decided to formularise colour, a little bit like Pantone. And they've made these colour standards and they've got a Munsell colour test which basically– So they've got Pantone as well? Oh, they've got everything. They kind of own everything. But the Munsell colour test is where you have to line these colours up between minimum and maximum saturation. And I think there's like 100 of them. And once, yeah, I think there is. And once you've counted up, it gives you a score of your percentage and accuracy.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, I didn't, my score was, I think I got an 80%.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, it's done by ophthalmologists normally. You can go to an ophthalmologist. We're actually trying to get a hold of one so we can run the test.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, we're going to put all of our potential hires for it. Because seeing the
SPEAKER_02:subtlety is interesting. And one of the things people talk about is, oh, is it a colour blindness test? Well, like everything in this world, it's a huge sliding scale. And colour blindness is just a cut-off point that has been introduced where you just can't. where they say, well, here's the line. If you can't understand the difference in the colours beyond this. But really for colour correcting, there's a lot more in that scale that's important.
SPEAKER_01:And it's not even colour correcting, it's also colour grading. So putting, applying colour effects to an image and keeping that application consistent is also part of it.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:So, and that's... I don't know, it'll be interesting to see... Because we have some photographers that have applied. It'll be interesting to see how they go with it as well. Because, you know, our crew have been trained in a really specific kind of colour. Like they've been trained from the 80s to be very match the Shirley colour. which we've talked about Shirley before.
SPEAKER_02:Match the Shirley.
SPEAKER_01:Match, match the Shirley. And so then when they see images that are modern now, which are often very dark, often very desaturated, quite green or whatever, they can be pretty vicious because the difference between that and a Shirley is…
SPEAKER_02:Because the Shirley looks like an everyday picture that looks dated, Shirley does with her 80s-ness, but it looks just like nice colour. It doesn't look like an interesting colour effect. And so our staff are like, yeah, it doesn't look like Shirley. Yeah,
SPEAKER_01:and you have someone like Cy Moore who would say of Bailey and Moore, and I would think that Soph would agree with this as well, that there is only one colour and that is film. We should all be aiming.
SPEAKER_02:One colour.
SPEAKER_01:There is only one correct colour look. Yeah, and it's film and what you can do with film with that. So you can make it brighter. You can shoot into the sun and it washes it out. You can shoot into darkness and it makes the colours richer and all that sort of stuff. So that's one of his sort of things that he talks about is you shouldn't be trying to apply all of these crazy effects. You should just try and get it to look like film looks. Because that's what we are as a community, as a universe, used to actually looking at. And so you can say that. Well, that's what this
SPEAKER_02:generation is. But, you know, you look at our kids' generation, what they're used to seeing with colour is not film. I mean, not our kids, but our kids get… But
SPEAKER_01:the vast majority of television and everything else is not heavily…
SPEAKER_02:Oh, you're saying……fucked with. Right, you're saying all media, not just photos are taken.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, media-ish, media-fedia, like it's all the fucking same.
SPEAKER_02:Right, yeah, gotcha.
SPEAKER_01:And like back in the– 10 years ago when Instagram was like, oh my God, what's Instagram? And one of the reasons you hated it was all of the bloody filters and crap that they put over it.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:It's not hipstamatic, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And now a lot of that stuff has been pulled back. I mean, all the filters, like all the editing post-production that clients do now is very different from what it was. Yeah, absolutely. And we still have some clients that do the edit from that sort of early 2000, mid-2000 edit. It's just fucking dreadful. People look really green and stuff. But so it's still popular to a certain segment of the marketplace.
SPEAKER_02:But that, you know, when it comes back to it, the Munsell test is relevant because it's your ability to separate different colours and know what needs to be
SPEAKER_01:done. Yeah, regardless of what the look is. That's what I'm trying to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that it's not about everybody looking like a Shirley. It's about everybody looking consistent throughout it. throughout a book or a group of photos. If
SPEAKER_02:you've ever 10-pin bowled, you know that...
SPEAKER_01:Unfortunately, I have been forced into doing that. The
SPEAKER_02:trick is you've got the boards that run down the full length, the boards that are the wooden thing that the bowling ball rolls on. And your trick, your skill is to be able to... throw the ball exactly the same way every single time and then you just move across the board when you need to hit a different thing. This is basically without putting spin and all the other crazy stuff that you learn with advanced techniques. So with colour, if you can see that and understand that that's what the colour is, you can be shifted one way or the other depending on it. Maybe
SPEAKER_01:that's why I'm so bad at it because I'm literally the most inconsistent person on the
SPEAKER_02:planet. You're consistently inconsistent. I am.
SPEAKER_01:No, I have a consistent morning routine. My morning routine is consistent no matter what happens. Yes. And yet still Frank doesn't know what the fuck is going on. Every morning he behaves as
SPEAKER_02:though... He looks at you going, hang on, what are we doing now? Do
SPEAKER_01:you know what? There are a lot of glorious reasons that I love Frank, but maybe one of the biggest reasons is because he is so dumb.
SPEAKER_02:Like your husband?
SPEAKER_01:No, because you have a very... You have a set of skills that you are not dumb about, that you are exceptional at. He does not. Frank does not have that. He has some skills. He looks at you with
SPEAKER_02:his beautiful eyes.
SPEAKER_01:That's true. You do the same thing. And you both have extraordinary eyelashes. So Frank and you have a lot in common.
SPEAKER_02:Why, thank you. I'll take that as a
SPEAKER_01:compliment. You do not sleep at the end of my bed, though. You insist on sleeping in the correct
SPEAKER_02:place. All right, then. Let's let these people go. Give them our love and listen for the next episode. Hopefully we– do you think we're going to be any more consistent with our
SPEAKER_01:release dates this year? Listen, it's all my fault. You're Mr Consistent. I'm just
SPEAKER_02:– I think
SPEAKER_01:– Listen, I am an introvert and it's been a hard year. Yes, it has. Okay? Because everyone's like, oh, you introverts, you must be loving being at home. No, because everybody's fucking here all the time. I can't get away from any of you. So this is a hard year for us introverts who want the extroverts that we have to live with because if we don't marry an extrovert, we never leave the house again. We have to deal with you psychos in our house for a full year.
UNKNOWN:Okay?
SPEAKER_02:And we're even in Australia. But what I'd like to do, I'd like to do it more regularly, release them more regularly than we have the last couple. But also I think weekly is too much. Do two
SPEAKER_01:weekly. Bi-week. What? No. Tweak. I'm
SPEAKER_02:aiming fortnightly.
SPEAKER_01:That's it.
SPEAKER_02:That's the word.
SPEAKER_01:Alright
SPEAKER_02:then. Love yous all. Love you. Bye.
UNKNOWN:Bye.