Reducing photography to its purest form: This workshop encourages particpants to engage with its rudiments: The physical action of light and chemicals on a two dimensional surface.

These simple parameters enable a fertile and stimulating crossover between photography,painting,printmaking and graphics.

Using the black and white wet darkroom as a base, a series of simple techniques will be introduced and students are given maximum time to explore their own creative agendas.

working within these parameters a surprisingly stimulating and engaging workflow arises. Areas explored are:

photograms - dramatic shadow pictures exploring composition and the interaction of two and three dimensional space.

contact printing - the inversion of the tones of the image often allows an extra dimension

painting with light - torches are used to control the action of light

chemigrams - applying cemistry locally to influence development

photo-batik - using handcream on the paper to protect local areas from chemistry.

Sun Pictures - students are shown that a great deal of this graphic activity can, in fact,take place outside the darkroom. Conventional black and white paper can yield a surprising amount of subtle, beautiful colours