Exhibit: Photogravure of Yoga, July 1 - August 16
June 25, 2019
Exhibit: Photogravure of Yoga
July 1 – August 16
Reception: Wednesday July 10 | 6:30 – 8:30 PM
Visit Portsmouth Public Library’s Levenson Room in July or August to view Photogravure of Yoga, an exhibit by artist Jay Goldsmith. Goldsmith uses photogravure, and intaglio printmaking process to print his stunning photographs of yoga practitioners from around the Seacoast area.
A reception will be held on Wednesday, July 10 from 6:30 to 8:30 PM – meet the artist and hear a short talk about his process!
Goldsmith spent the first twelve years of his adult life as a high school English teacher. In 1981 he decided to give up ten weeks of paid vacation every summer and free health and dental insurance and devote his full attention to a career in professional portrait photography. He is a partner with event photographer Julia Russell. For most of his long career Jay has photographed children and their families throughout New England, in natural light, from June through October.
For the last ten years he has been working with hands-on alternatives to digital printing. He began with platinum/palladium, a nineteenth century printing process that is characterized by a very long tonal scale and an extremely stable, aesthetically pleasing image. In this process, particles of these two precious metals are embedded within the fibers of paper to make the image.
Most recently, Goldsmith has been making photogravure intaglio prints. The yoga poses in this exhibit utilize very dramatic black inks and hand-made watercolor papers. The procedure starts by manipulating a file (using Photoshop’s curve function) from a Canon digital camera so that the image on the monitor closely approximates the tones in the final print. That file is then printed onto a transparency film (quite similar to that used with overhead projectors). The size of this positive transparency is the size of the finished image. This transparency is then sandwiched with a metal photopolymer plate and subjected to a very bright light in the 350-400nm range. The plate is then washed in water, dried, inked and run through a rotary press. The sessions for this exhibit were all shot in Goldsmith’s Portsmouth studio using a Norman flash unit and several heads, diffusers, and modifiers. They were all printed on a large French press at Chases’ Garage in York, Maine.
