Self-Portraiture (Part 4)

From the beginning of this project I've wanted to incorporate analogue processes into my work, so I took my self-portraits and printed them inverted onto acetate. This allowed me to do contact prints in the darkroom. At first I did it in the colour darkroom as the black and white one wasn't available, but this didn't go very well.

If you look closely, you can see that there's some wobbly lines on the print, which was caused by an issue with the printer printing on acetate. There was also a strong orange hue which I didn't like, and the paper is really glossy, which I'm not a fan of. The image also came out very grainy.

I went to the black and white darkroom the next day to try again, but still ran into some problems. The image was still very grainy and had weird wobbly lines all over it, so I reprinted the acetate and adjusted the background layers on the Photoshop file to try and get rid of them. The only paper I could find in the darkroom was glossy, so I asked Maddy if there was any lustre paper hiding somewhere. Instead, she found pearl paper, which has an interesting quality to it. I think the pearl was definitely better than the gloss, but ideally I want lustre to match the photo paper that my grandfather's original portrait was printed on.

Luckily, I had bought some fine lustre photo paper a few months ago for some at-home photographic workshops that never happened, so I brought it in the next day and tried again. Unfortunately, the paper was only 5x7in, so I had to reprint the acetates to fit. I actually like the smaller size though, even if it's not true to my grandparents' original A5 and A4 prints.

I started pretty late in the day, so I could only get 3 density step wedges done. I used my fine lustre paper and I'm pretty happy with the texture it gave me. This time I used the portrait of me as my grandmother. If I were to do this again I think I'd put glass over the acetate negative to make sure the print is as focused as possible, and I think I'd print for 5 seconds at f/11. However, I've decided to reshoot my photos on film to get the proper analogue quality that I'm looking for, so I didn't print any more, and instead focused on getting my shoot done.