Llewellyn Berry
Woman on a Persian Rug
Posted on February 12, 2011by Llewellyn Berry
Not only did I photograph just about everything I could find inside my house, in the backyard or down the street, but I also experimented with different films and developers. One series of experiments was with Kodalith materials. I have boxes and boxes of Kodalith negatives and positives, 8×10 and 11×14.
Kodalith film was sheet film and processed with the Kodalith A&B developer, removed the intermediate tones from black and white film images and left only stark black and white images when printed. The process actually is a bit more involved than that but not much.
Essentially, I took a black and white continuous tone negative and exposed the image to a sheet of Kodalith film producing a positive image. After that film dried, contact printed it onto a fresh sheet of Kodalith sheet film producing a negative image. I then took the negative Kodalith sheet of film and contacted it onto a sheet of photographic paper and producing a positive image.
Sounds complicated but it isn’t really. Essentially the printing is a sequence of negatives producing positives producing negatives and so on and so on.
There is a calmness of the image because of the woman looking down at the highlighted pattern in the rug. Even in the midst of the starkness, I believe the tilt of her head evokes calm. The image might not work if there was more detail in the woman’s face. Perhaps there is a certain degree of anonymity in the indistinctness of her face.
There are three dominant elements in the photograph: One is the highlighted face and arms. The second is the highlighted design on the rug and the third is the negative space of the rest of her body. So, in essence, the three elements make for a simplistic photograph but powerful in the starkness of the light and dark elements.
I got to a point where I had found a very inexpensive supply of 11×14 Kodalith sheet film and I made Kodalith negatives and positives of all my favorite 35mm negatives. The process didn’t always work but it was fun and sometimes I surprised myself with the results.
Woman on a Persian Rug was the first serious Kodalith print I made as an artistic expression.
Woman on a Persian Rug
Washington, DC
1970