14
New Inkjet Prints
~ September 2026 ~
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Introduction
The fourteen images published here have been presented below in groups of two or three because the images in each group--and in some cases in more that one group--share something in common that I will be writing comments on. All of these images come from my blog projects, and the images I have chosen to print and publish in this series of new "mini" inkjet print projects had not been made into inkjet prints until this September, 2026 and become part of my growing 2023 - 2026+ Inkjet Print Project. There are a few images in this project that have been printed in the 12x12" size and here you will those images in larger print formats (15x15" 18x18" & 21x21")
As in my past project, the images chosen to printed was determined simply by reviewing quickly my collection digital images used in each of my blog projects. When the images attracted my attention, if I considered them worthy of being looked at more carefully, and if I felt they needed to printed in a larger format, I have made the necessary changes both for printing and for adding to my digital archive of my photography which goes back to the middle and late 1960's.
I have been enjoying seeing my blog images in print form,* and in some cases in larger size formats. Working and revising old work with new printings provides me with new ways of seeing and understanding the work. The more I work with an image, the more I learn about the image and myself. In a way, reprinting older work is a form of image contemplation which
inspires looking more deeply into an imaged getting in touch with latent meanings if allowed to surface into consciousness.
(*Note: when I started creating projects for my newly initiated blog in November, 2010 I had decided to not print the images (at least at the time I made them) since they would be available to everyone via my blog. I am now feeling and enjoying the longing to make more and more prints of favorite images now that I have gotten into a wonderful work flow with the my Inkjet Print Project.)
When selecting images to print for this project (#8 of an ongoing series of "mini" inkjet print projects) I was not thinking about the relationships between the images I chose to print. But once I had the images all printed and made copy files to reproduce the images on this blog page, I could not help but organize and sequence the images in a way the felt right for me. Then finally I decided to group the images that I saw shared some kind of visual or conceptual meaning for me. I have written some brief comments for each group in an attempt to share with you some of my insights.
The Photographs
with Commentaries
Group One (3 images)
Image #1 Inkjet print 18x18"
A Screaming (Stone) Face behind a (stone) window in a hidden underground city in Turkey
Image #2 Inkjet print 15x15"
An Earth Mound, in Death Valley, and the road that passes by it and through the Valley
Image #3 Inkjet print 15x15"
Death Valley: a second view of the road that passes through the valley
Of this first grouping of three images, the second and third image are together for pretty obvious reasons. During a visit to Death Valley many years ago, I became fascinated with the road that runs through the valley. It had a very strong presence for me and I think I felt comforted by knowing it could help me get out of the valley in a hurry if necessary. ~ It was very very hot and dry when my wife and I were there, and during one of our rather long hikes --through an area with high walls of stone--we became panicked by a feeling that we may have lost track of our way back to our car! ~ The name Death Valley was not only not lost on me, but gained real, personal significance!
*
So, how does the screaming rock photograph made in Turkey, in one of their underground cities, relate to the two Death Valley road photographs?
I felt claustrophobic in the underground caves, and when I walked by the stone "window" that looks into one of the "city's" rooms or living spaces, I saw that screaming "face" and it reminded me of several movies I had seen as a young person in which people who had been buried alive were screaming to get out of their coffins . . . which had been buried under the ground.
While walking through the underground city, our guide was telling us stories of why people were living in these hidden caves that had been turned into real living spaces for large numbers of people, and why they were trying to hide from their enemies; and some of the awful things their enemies did to them once they were discovered hiding underground.
I encourage you to visit this link underground city to learn more about Turkey's underground cities.
* *
Group Two (3 images)
Image #4 Inkjet print 15x15"
Gloria, Illuminated and pregnant with Shaun (in our bedroom, Albuquerque, New Mexico 1971)
Image #5 Inkjet print 15x15"
Gloria? (her spirit?) looking down at a plastic bag left laying on our bed in Georgia.
This is an inkjet print copy of a 1971 solarized silver gelatin print
These two images were made perhaps a year apart in two different cities: Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I was a graduate student seeking an MFA degree with a teaching fellowship at UNM 1969-1972; the other, Decatur, Georgia, a few miles outside of Atlanta, where I took my first teaching job at Georgia State University-Atlanta's Art Department. For many years I thought image #5 was made in Albuquerque--I was fooled by the bedspread, I think, perhaps the similar walls, and perhaps by the strange solarization effects in the image that looks to me like a ghost of faint luminous spirit. I had been making solarized images in the little house we were living in Albuquerque, in 1972, when Shaun was born in April of that year, and I graduated with my MFA (teaching) degree.
I used solarization techniques in many of my MFA thesis exhibition photographs presented at the UNM Art Museum in 1972. I continued that work in the years I taught in Atlanta, Georgia (1972-75).
Visit these four related links: New Mexico Photographs & Intimate Space-New Mexico Interiors, then In the (Georgia) Woods Series and The Atlanta City Series.
When my wife Gloria and I moved to Albuquerque for my MFA studies, and teaching opportunity as a recipient of a full teaching fellowship, we had just been married for a few weeks, and a few weeks before we were married Gloria was in a horrible accident in Brooklyn, where she had been going to school at Pratt. Gloria had nearly died from a car that had side-swiped her. She had received a very severe concussion which took her over a year to recover from.
We rented a small house near the university that first year and a very odd thing happened the first night we slept there. We were use to sleeping together with me on her right side; but in our new sleeping situation we encountered in Albuquerque, Gloria thought she would rather sleep with me on her left side. . . . What I am going to tell you really happened:
In the middle of the night I woke up and saw Gloria standing next to me; she was looking down at me laying on the edge of the bed. She was glowing with soft light that I assumed came from the street lights outside diffused by the white shades covering our bedroom window. As I moved over to let her get into bed next to me (thinking she wanted to cuddle up with me) I felt her body! next to me on the other side of the bed. When I looked up again, she (her Spirit? a Ghost?) had disappeared.
The title under the #5 image mentions Gloria's name, a spirit and . . . that it is looking down at a plastic bag (in a similar way that Gloria's luminous presence was looking down--at me--laying in bed, with the same bed cover as in image #4, in which we see Gloria illuminated, pregnant, laying in bed with the same bed cover as in #5.
~
Now, I want to write about the third image I am including in this group, #6 (below). I am pairing it with image #5 for very obvious reasons, it seems to me: both images have bags in them (a plastic bag in #5, a paper bag in #6). The spirit-ghost is looking down at the plastic bag in #5, and I (the photographer) am looking down at the paper bag in image #6.
Everything is connected, it seems to me. Indeed, meaningful perceptions of acausal juxtapositions (or, in other words, synchronicity) was a major theme in my MFA required written thesis.
(Note: In 1982 I read a very important book by Robert Bly, News of the Universe, which got me interested in making Thing Centered Photographs. Image #6 is an example of my more recent "Thing-Centered photographs." )
Image #6 Inkjet print 15x15"
A paper bag on our ping pong table, Canandaigua, NY (A Thing-Centered Photograph)
* *
Group Three (3 images)
Image #7 A Symmetrical inkjet print 18x18"
An "Illuminated Butterfly"
(a symmetrical image constructed with four images of luminous plastic bucket full of laundry powder)
Image #8 A Symmetrical inkjet print 21x21"
A "Stone Butterfly"
(a symmetrical image of the stones on the hillside that runs next to Broad Brook Road, VT)
Visit my 12x12" Project Broad Brook Road
Image #9 A Symmetrical inkjet print 21x21"
A Symmetrical photograph of Broad Brook Stones, constellated in the form of an imaginal ritual site.
Each of the three images in this third grouping is a Four-fold Symmetrical Photograph. Image #7 was constructed with four identical images of a dramatically illuminated plastic container of laundry powder.
Image #8 was constructed with an image of stones I photographed on the side of a hill in Southern Vermont that runs along a dirt road named Broad Brook Road and on the other side of the road runs the mountain brook of the same name. The symmetrical transformation of the source image created a form that appeared to me as a butterfly as the title indicates. In fact these particular stones along the road has generated a small series of "Butterfly" symmetrical photographs.
And the third symmetrical image, #9 was constructed with a photograph of stones that were actually in the Brook, in Southern Vermont. The image has a magical quality for me, one that invokes a feeling of a ritual site consisting of a circular constellation of large brightly lit stones surround by shadowed blue-colored stones.
Broad Brook has become a good friend of mine since I started photographing it in 2015, a few years after my good friends (and my wife's sister Phyllis, and her husband Jim) moved from Rochester, NY to their new home in Vermont, situated just across the road from the Brook that runs next to it.
Note: Visit my project Broad Brook Road to see my list of photography projects based in Vermont and the Brook.
My symmetrical construction process has generated several images of varying subject matter in the form of butterflies, and here (above) you see two very different variations on that theme.
In the first picture (below) of the fourth group consisting of two images, we see several blue stones on the hillside that runs next to Broad Brook Road. My title for the image includes a word that also appears in the title of the photograph immediately above (#9), and that word is what I want to write about next.
* *
Group Four (2 images)
Image #10 Inkjet print 18x18"
A constellation of blue stones on the hillside next to Broad Brook Road, VT
This image appeared in an earlier 12x12" inkjet print version for the
12x12" Study Project Broad Brook Road
Image #11 Inkjet print 18x18"
A constellation of meadow plants in light-blue snow after an early morning winter storm
(the image is from a Covid Pandemic project The Great Wonder In Simple Things)
The word constellation almost always invokes an image of lines that connects certain stars in a clear evening sky.
I have a fascination with the idea of constellations, and have often made photographs of various kinds of constellations, as in images numbered #9, 10, 11 and #12 below, the first of two images for Group Five.
* *
Group Five (2 images)
Image #12 Inkjet print 15x15"
Still Life: this photograph was made in my basement during the Covid Pandemic
When I fell in love with the painting of Giorgio Morandi in 2012-13 I created a multi-chaptered blog project inspired by his work entitled Still Life. Morandi constructed his own still life composition, and that is something I was never very good at; instead, I enjoyed finding things in the real world that had visual structures and spatial relationships that I thought was related to Morandi's painting. I made straight photographs of an "already ordered universe" as in images #12 above and#13 below.
(Please visit my Morandi inspired Still Life Project)
You'll have to take my word for it right now, but these two still life photographs (above and below) have characteristics related to Morandi's paintings, and my vision represented here in these photographs are in part a celebration of my love for his work.
Images #12 & #13 are good examples of two different kinds of "found" pictures I made of existing constellations of objects. Image #13 is an example of a "found Morandi StillLife" I saw staring me in the face on a restaurant table I was sitting at. ~ Image #12 was made during the "dark days" of the Covid-Pandemic. I had left all the things pictured on my basement studio table, illuminated only by one small window far away, in another part of the basement. The image is a kind of metaphor for my dark and isolated feelings regarding the two year period we all suffered as a nation because of the Pandemic. I was fortunate in being able to take refuge from the pandemic by making lots of photographs.*
(*Please visit this link to see all of my Covid-Pandaemic related projects)
Image #13 Inkjet print 15x15"
A Still Life with flowers, salt shaker, water bottle and a slice of lemon
(This photograph was made before the Covid Pandemic and was
inspired by the painter Morandi--visit my project Still Life)
* *
Last Part (1 image)
I am concluding this project with one last image (see below). It is a digital blog-published image of a 15x15" inkjet copy print I made of the 10x10" silver gelatin photograph that is to be on display in what I think may be an important group exhibition of photographs presented in Chicago, opening this September . . . on my birthday! The exhibition will include the image below and one other of my photographs from my 1983-84 project entitled Images of Eden. All of the photographs in that project were originally black & white silver gelatin prints made from black and white 2 1/4" square black & white negatives.
Following the image and its title you will find information about the exhibition, then I will share with you the relatively simple process I went through to digitize the silver gelatin print image so I could make the 15x15" inkjet copy print, and publish the digital copy file in the the blog project you are looking at right now.
Image #14 Inkjet print 15x15"
A Flowering Bush on a foggy day in a Milwaukee County Park
from my 1983-84 project Images of Eden.
The original 10x10" sliver gelatin print of this image is being exhibited in Chicago at the
Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College-Chicago along with
one other image from the Eden project. The title of the exhibition is:
"If Emmett Till Lived : Freedom On American Ground" curated by
Sarah Elizabeth Lewis and Rev. Wheller Parker, Jr. The exhibit
will run open September 10, 2026 and run through December 19.
A catalogue is being printed, and there are plans in the
works to make an online version of the exhibition
so more people will have access to the images
and texts being presented in the exhibition.
*
"In the wake of what would have been Till's 85th birthday our project engages
individuals and institutions around the country as we ask "What would
Emmett Till's life have been had he safely boarded the train back
to Chicago? What would that life have required of us all?
Have we made good on his sacrifice?"
*
Making Digital Inkjet Print Copies of Silver Gelatin Prints
The image above, Flowering Bush, is a digital blog-published version of a 15x15" inkjet copy
print I made of an original 10x10"gelatin silver print I produced in 1983-84. Since I no
longer have a chemical based photographic practice (I am working only digitally now)
I needed to make a large digital copy file--in the Tif. format--so I could make
the inkjet copy print of the image; then I had to make a copy of that file
and reduce it to a Jpg. formatted digital file so that I could publish
the image in this blog project.
There are several ways of making high quality digital copy files of silver gelatin prints . . .
or images in any other media. Many galleries sell digital copy prints which they
sometimes refer to as "fine art reproductions" or Giclée Prints.
Most recently I have been making my digital copy files--for making inkjet copy prints and
publishing images on my blow--with a high quality digital camera. Before I got that
camera I used an old Nikor film scanner to make the large digital copy files
(formatted as Tifs and Jpgs) with which I could make the inkjet copy prints
and files for publishing on my blog.
(Another option: you can hire a professional digital services business to make
high quality scans of your prints--or your negatives. And they could also
make the inkjet copy prints for at an additional cost.)
The wonderful thing about the digital process is that after the digital files are made
they can be adjusted with digital editing software (like Adobe Photoshop)
to make any improvements to the image deemed necessary by you.
I have been able to make very high quality inkjet copy prints of my original silver gelatin
images that, in many cases, are more articulate and preferable to me than
the actual vintage silver gelatin prints I made many years ago . . . with
the added benefit of the archival nature of the papers and inks I
have chosen to use for the inkjet copy prints.
* * *
This project was published on my blog's
Welcome Page on September 8, 2026
It is Project #8 in an ongoing
series of mini Inkjet Print
Thematic Projects.
Here is the list of my 2026 mini Inkjet Print Thematic projects published so far:
"It Is Always ONE" June 5, 2026
"Seeing Things" June 19, 2026 =
Seven Windswept Symmetrical Photographs July 19, 2026
"Nine Quirky Photographs" July 23, 2026
"Six Thing-Centered Photographs" with An Exercise in Reading Image Juxtapositions August 11, 2026
"Ten New Inkjet Prints, August 2026: a MAKOM project" August 24, 2026
"14 New Inkjet Prints, September 2026" September 8, 2026
Related Blog Projects:
Welcome Page to The Departing Landscape blog-website which includes the complete hyperlinked listing of my online photography blog projects dating back to the 1960's, my resume, contact information, Introductory texts, and more.
