Mamiyaroid 19

Cy Twombly and the Fresson Process

Readers! I’d like to share your favorite phone photos for my New Year’s Day newsletter so please send me your favorite with a short caption. Just respond to this message and I will get it.

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One thing I greatly miss during this time is going to the library to walk the stacks. While writing my novel I wanted my character to have her own influences, so I pulled books at random from the photography section and in this way I found some gems that influenced my photography and my book. I’m currently seeking a literary agent for my book and I re-wrote my query letter and I was surprised by how much I had revised the book from the draft my first readers read and what I hope to send to agents in the coming year. (If you have literary agent recommendations, please message me!)

One thing that remains in the book is Cy Twombly’s book of photographs, long out of print. I found this by chance at the Brooklyn Public Library. The images I fell for were the tulips. Here’s a piece on the photographs.

Here is an explanation of Cy Twombly's process:

Like many artists,Twombly immediately took to the Polaroid SX-70 when it came out in 1972. Smartly designed and inexpensive, it produced the first instant image, spitting out a picture at the touch of its red button. All the photographer had to do was watch and wait for the image to resolve itself. The SX-70 picture was three inches square and its colours reminded you of cotton candy or pop. Its jewel-like surface transformed the world into a private record, a per- manent memory of something seen. Twombly recorded all his subjects -- the echoing rooms of his houses, the foliage beyond, sunsets, the lemons and flowers of Rome and Gaeta -- in a series of personal visions.

Like all colour photographs, the SX-70s were unstable. The colours shifted and faded. Per- haps it was for that reason that in 1998 Twombly took his SX-70 snapshots to the Fresson family in Savigny-sur-Orge outside Paris to have them rephotographed and printed in their proprietary process. A type of carbon print, Fresson doesn’t use the light sensitivity of silver to produce an image but rather pigmented gelatin sensitized in such a way that when light hits, the gelatin hardens. What is left is then washed away leaving a positive print. Fresson is pigment based, unlike the dye-based processes usually used in colour photography; it is difficult to master -- the negative has to be contact printed four times in four different co- lours one on top of the other in perfect register -- as well as expensive to make: the family chooses carefully for whom it will print. But what it produces is a print that is permanent - no other colour photograph really is.

Twombly’s Fresson prints turned his Polaroids, which snatched an object or scene from the fluid movement of time, into soft, grainy medium size images that captured the illusive nature of memory itself. 

I loved how abstract these images are. A lot of that has to do with the “limitations” of then-available SX70 cameras, and also the Fresson Process.

I got my first SX70 camera a few years ago and then bought expired film at a steep discount but learned that when this film expires, the chemistry changes, so I had to work quickly through the packs before they turned bad. Sometimes this gives you interesting results, but more often the colors are less attractive. I learned a lot working through those packs over summer 2018. I first realized the abstract potential for myself when I made these images in low-light:

All three taken with my first SX70 camera and expired Impossible Project film. The last two are “overexposed” because I shined my phone’s flashlight at them but I like the effect.

This was taken with my second SX70 camera with the close up lens. Polaroid Originals SX70 film. (I dropped my first SX70 camera, to my horror!)

I never thought tulips were very interesting flowers until I saw Twombly’s tulips. In Dean and Deluca I once saw Parrot Tulips (like the ones in the Twombly photographs above) but didn’t buy them for myself because they were $35. Next time I see the same type of tulips I am treating myself.

Until next time…

I love to receive comments and questions about photography and cameras!

My email: adalenakavanagh@gmail.com

Instagram: @mamiyaroid (instant/film) @5redpandas (personal)

Twitter: @adalenakavanagh

Also, if you’re thinking of buying Polaroid film for the first time, here is my referral code, which gets you 10% off, and I get some reward points.

Original photography prints: adalenakavanagh.bigcartel.com (I change out the shop every month of so. If you see something you like, let me know, I’m happy to make you a print.)

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

-Adalena Kavanagh