72 pages · 13×16 hardbound · 67 images · Position layout: 1 week · Published by Nazraeli Press
A collection of collagraphs — works made in collaboration with Stephen Aldrich, combining 19th-century steel engravings and woodcuts into composite images, photographed and printed as gelatin silver prints. The source material is collage; the result reads as if engraved in a single layer.
Each print was made specifically for this book. The darkroom work — dodging, burning, bleaching with potassium ferricyanide to open backgrounds and add dimensionality, dyeing to deepen lines and darken selected areas — was done print by print, image by image. The goal was to eliminate evidence of the collage seams, add apparent depth to what would otherwise read as flat, and direct the eye through each composition. Making the prints took approximately a year — roughly five days per image.
The book was designed and position-laid out in PageMaker. The printer scanned the finished prints and inserted them into the file for offset lithographic printing — a pre-digital production workflow standard for fine art books of this period.