I was inspired by Susan Derges' watergrams and wanted to create my own. I wasn't sure how to do it, as I had no access to a darkroom or any of the chemistry. After watching some tutorials on YouTube and searching on the internet, I found a recipe for caffenol-c, an effective developer made from coffee, soda crystals and vitamin c:
300ml water
46g soda crystals
12g coffee
5g vitamin c
Most recipes call for washing soda powder rather than soda crystals (which contain more water) but the powder is hard to get hold of in the UK. All you need to do, however, is use 2.7x more of the crystals than the powder recipe states. The coffee must not be decaf as the caffeine is the active agent. They also advise against using vitamin c tablets, preferring a powdered version. Due to Covid-19, there was one pot of vitamin c left on the shelf, and it was in tablet form. I ground the tablets down into a fine powder, and this seemed to work fairly well, although I did notice some powder sitting on top of the solution so it hadn't dissolved fully.
I set up a tub in the middle with water to wash the prints and to create the watergrams themselves. Finally, I had a tub for homemade fix of saltwater, using 150g of salt per 500ml of water. I blacked out my bathroom and lit it with a makeshift safe light (a rear bicycle light), and used a flash gun to expose the paper while pouring water on it. I had to experiment with where to point the flash - whether directly at the print or bounced off the ceiling - and got some interesting results.
Some of the watergrams are quite beautiful, and others are more plain or ambiguous. All of them are eerie, and give the impression of movement. Occasionally there are some scratches - this is likely from me trying to move them to the next tub without tongs. Most of them have marks around the outside, which I think may be a result of light bouncing off the sides of the tub during exposure.
I also had some large negatives I had printed onto acetate for some cyanotypes, so I thought I'd give these a quick go, too. I bounced the flash off the ceiling for these, and was surprised at how well they came out first time. If I were printing them properly I would experiment with different filters, but for a quick print in the bathroom, I am delighted with how they turned out. Unfortunately, the fix I created wasn't perfect, and many of the images have started to turn pink. On the second image of Harley, you can see this starting to happen, but at the time of writing, both he and my niece blowing bubbles look positively rosy.
I took my three favourite watergrams and edited them in Photoshop, changing the levels and the colour balance. I decided to go with an overall blue tone to echo the blues shown in my cyanotypes. This also has the benefit of making them more water-like rather than something you could imagine seeing under a microscope, particularly in the second and third prints.
Comments