Caroline Hickman Vaughan Fine Art Photography / Poetry

Hand-coated platinum printing was a non-stop process that I could only do by from Friday night to Sunday since I had a full time day job. Some of the 300 pound papers never tore but had a grain that was more crude. My favorite paper for years was Fabriano Artisto. I frequently bought a large supply. Suddenly one year they changed the chemical on the surface, the sizing, and it turned all my prints orange. Other photographers using alternative processes, found the same road block. Finally one paper company made a paper that was very good for platinum, 150 pounds, and I migrated to that paper for the duration of my printing in platinum which lasted for fifteen years. Before I cut my kitchen in half to make an 8x8 foot darkroom, I researched the process, found it liced red blood cells and asked father to designa stainless steel commercial hood which would draw the air across the trays of chemicals and out of the water. We took one window out and installed a motel air conditioner which blew hot or cold air. We took out the other window and mounted an attic fan in plywood, attaching the exhaust fumes through a duct pipe that went into the top of the hood. He even designed a drip rail, something that would catch any condensation. He drew this on a paper napkin. We both went to Comfort Engineers to have them fabricate the hood. Whenever I entered any other darkroom the chemical fumes were the first clue that their ventilation was not substantial. I wanted a clean room like Intel.

 

I coated the paper on Friday night, hung it up to dry over night with the warm heat. I positioned my negative against the coated paper, slipped it into an 11x14 wooden frame with glass and two metal prongs on the back which kept the negative and paper in tight pressured contact. I used a platinum printer, made exposures with a Gralab timer and walked away as you were never supposed to look at the light which exposed the plate.

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A hand-coated emulsion of precious metals on watercolor paper, pressed against glass and exposed by July sunlight for six minutes, just as the turn of the century photographers had done with their negatives, sitting on easels to capture the sun’s rays reminded me how slow the emulsion was. A regular silver print made by an enlarger's normal exposure was F11 for 15 seconds.  On the ground glass of the camera, father was about half an inch tall, dwarfed by the canopy of red oaks in winter.  He leaned on his cane, wore a dark plaid Pendleton wool shirt and stared back at me, as I darted up and down from under the dark cloth of the view camera, seeing him upside down and inverted from left to right, the original way your eye sees before your brain inverts the image. I was trying to focus in two places at once which meant I had to tilt the lens so both were in the same focal plane. I needed his eyes and the top of the trees. The winter sky and tree branches spreading into a dendritic pattern was at the bottom of the glass, his feet at the top. 

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This upside-down way of seeing the world by the time I was 33 became my new normal natural perspective, not only because I had spent more than 12 years already looking through a view camera, but because in retrospect, everything in my childhood felt upside down and backwards.

 

I drove father on trips to the Virginia farm as he was awaiting cataract surgery. It was an hour and half drive. I asked him what it was like to see with cataracts. He insisted that he could see fine, he could be driving and didn’t need me to drive him. I told him I wanted to meet the forest ranger who gave him advice about the thirty acres of pine trees planted on the farm. He finally said he could see fine in the center but towards the outside of his vision it darkened. An idea came to me. I would use a short lens to vignette the image. This would reflect his vision. Every lens makes a round image and all photographers used rectangular or square film. The appropriate lens is one in which the “circle” is sufficiently large to cover the square or rectangle. That is a normal lens. A lens that does not cover the area would make a circle, and is called a short lens. The darkness along the edges is intentional. The dendritic pattern of tree branches reminded me of the veins in his eye. The word play on his nickname “son, sonny and sun” vignetted the sides similar to his sight. Son Vaughan became my first narrative, the first image that reflected the story he told me.

 

I continued to photograph my father four times a year for fifteen years. He lived to be 97 ½.  I have many images of him in platinum in the same shirt and cane. The longitudinal process documented how he aged. I called it the life series. Mother was included in all of the portraits. My parents  hated being photographed at first, but over time they came to enjoy being the center of attention for at least an hour on Christmas, Easter, Mother’s Birthday, Father’s Birthday, my birthday and Thanksgiving. As they aged, mother gardened or rather pulled weeds and father planted tomatos. Often when I appeared at their home while I worked for Duke, at noon they were still in bed and cared less about their appearance. Before every portrait, I took them for haircuts and kept the clothes dry cleaned at my studio so they would not be lost. For their portraits together I started around 1982. This Life Series morphed into a larger project named Home Ground which also documented two farms my parents owned, one in NC and the other in Virginia.