Salt Printing Masterclass at London Metropolitan University

This week I taught a Salt printing masterclass at The School of Art, Architecture & Design which forms part of London Metropolitan University.

Salt Printing is a contact printing process, which means that the final print will be the same size as your negative.

It was great to see the students immersed and having a great time making their own salt prints, all of which I’m happy to say turned out really well. It was a pleasure for me to see them working, enjoying and keeping this 183 year old process alive. Some of them even went back into the darkroom the following day to do more – happy days!

Personally, I think it’s fantastic that the head of the department at The School of Art, Architecture & Design push back the waves to make these masterclasses available to the BA photography students, giving them a larger creative tool-box, allowing them a wider visual language to express themselves.

It’s hard to imagine a time where there was no such thing as photography, especially today when everyone takes photographs.

Salted paper was the first photographic invention, for photography as we know it today.

Henry Fox Talbot’s discovery – making a negative in camera and using that negative to make multiple prints is the basis of all photography today. The Daguerrotype may historically mark the introduction of photography to the world but it only produced a single image.

Historically salt printing was thought to be dull and dead looking because it needed a contrasty negative for the long exposure scale – today with digital technology we can make digital negatives using curves in photoshop to suit salt printing and other alternative processes and creating prints with a beautiful longer tonal range.

Below:
Some of my own hand made Salt prints and behind the scene photographs of the Salt Printing Masterclass.

Many thanks to Kasia Kowalska for the behind the scene photos.

If you are interested in photography workshops, masterlasses, mentoring, or one to one photographic tuition, please email me at ian at ianphillipsmclaren.com