SYP Platinum and Palladium: Photographers

Paul Strand (1890-1976)

An American photographer and filmmaker known for his ‘straight photography’ of street portraits and cityscapes. His prints are renowned for their fine detail and tonal range. His work has been compared to that of Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston having been taught by Lewis Hine.

The portraits made were of New Yorkers, he wanted to make “portraits of people such as you see in the New York parks and places, sitting around, without their being conscious of being photographed. … I felt that one could get a quality of being through the fact that the person did not know he was being photographed … [and I wanted to capture] these people within an environment which they themselves had chosen to be in, or were in anyway.” Probably his most famous portrait is that of the blind woman in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Strand 1

Platinum print

Strand was known to move from print to motion pictures throughout his career. The following image of drift wood shows the quality of platinum printing. The details within the grain are sharp, the tones are rich and velvet like. The subject matter works well with the transition in tones. This image sits within the NOMA’s collection and is considered one of its fines examples of platinum printing by Strand.

Strand 2

https://noma.org/object-lesson-platinum-print-photography/

Edward Weston (1886-1958)

In the article ‘Noble metals for the early modern era: platinum, silver-platinum and palladium print’ (2014) Constance McCabe discusses the work by Weston, highlighting the fact that Weston’s formal education was in the peak of platinum printing and his early exhibitions were made on platinum and palladium paper. She claims that he continued to work in this medium until 1926 when he was forced to change to silver gelatine paper due to the increasing cost of both platinum and palladium.

Weston was known for his images of landscapes, still-lives, nudes and portraits. He was one of the co-founders of the f/64 group which required its members to use large format view cameras, small apertures and print to achieve precise detail and careful tonal range.

Weston 1

Images from Weston Gallery [https://www.westongallery.com/original-works-by/edward-weston 9accessed 27/03/2022)]

https://edward-weston.com/

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/edward-weston-2720

https://ccp.arizona.edu/artists/edward-weston

Laura Gilpin (1891-1979)

An American photographer known for her images of Native Americans in particular the Navajo and Pueblo. She also photographed the wide-open landscapes of the South West. Her images have more of an emphasis on the mood than on detail and the use of platinum as a means to show this in the printing helped show the soft aspects of her images.

Gilpin was deeply influenced by Clarence H White’s pictorial style: his preference was for soft focus lenses, design and the flat, decorative forms of Japanese prints. Gilpin embraced White’s idea of photography as a personal expression of art. Many years later she commented on this phase of her career writing, “Many enter the field of photography with the impulse to record a scene. They often fail to realize that what they wish to do is to record the emotion felt upon viewing that scene. . . a mere record photograph in no way reflects that emotion.” (Gilpin, 1942)