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| Heather Oelklaus, Hero, photogenic print, 2011. Image courtesy of the artist. |
Did the medium “photogenic print” seem a little funny to you when you checked out our recent acquisition by Heather Oelklaus called “Hero”? Perhaps a little redundant, because if you’ve checked out Oelklaus’ works either on her web site or blog, you’d see that all her works are pretty “photogenic.”
Oelklaus uses lumen printing, a process where you take photo paper and put something organic, such as a flower, on top of it. Then you place a piece of glass over it and leave it under the sun, or other UV light source for a varying amount of time, some leave it for 30 minutes, some leave it for hours. You then place this so-called “photo-sandwich” of paper, material, and glass into fixer. Fixer is the final chemical solution used in the photographic process, stabilizing the image by remove the unexposed silver halide on the photo paper, and the paper is no longer sensitive to light.
This process requires minimum time, equipment and money, so it’s a great alterative to the more traditional contact prints or photograms. Plus, you get to spend some time in the outdoors!