The Weight of Light: Printmaking as Documentary Act explores what happens when the same photograph moves through different material forms. Using a single image, I print across historical and contemporary processes—including platinum, cyanotype, carbon transfer, photogravure, risograph, and wet plate collodion.
Each process alters the image’s surface, depth, and relationship to light. Rather than treating printing as a neutral act of reproduction, I approach it as interpretation. By holding the image constant and changing only the process, the project asks: In a world of frictionless digital images, does the material form of a photograph shape its meaning?
My work begins with a simple question: What changes when a photograph becomes a physical object, something printed, handled, and encountered in real space?
For this thesis, I print the same photograph across a range of historical and contemporary processes—from albumen and platinum-palladium to cyanotype, carbon transfer, photogravure, risograph, inkjet, and wet plate collodion. Each version originates from the same digital file, yet its material form shapes how it is read. Differences in surface, tonal range, scale, and texture alter the image’s presence.
Rather than treating printing as neutral reproduction, I approach it as interpretation. Each process carries its own history and expectations around permanence, labor, access, and authenticity—and these shape how the resulting image is received. Why does a photograph rendered in platinum feel more authoritative than one produced by risograph or inkjet, even when the image itself is unchanged? The method of printing doesn’t just affect appearance; it constructs credibility.
In a world of frictionless digital images, this is easily overlooked. By holding the image constant and changing only the process, I make visible how material influences what we see, what we value, and what we trust.
Photography has long been associated with truth and evidence. Rather than rejecting that history, I examine how it operates—how certain materials come to feel like proof while others don’t, even when they originate from the same source.
Printing, for me, is where meaning is worked out. Repeating the image across multiple processes becomes a way of thinking in material terms. The labor and constraints of each process are not obstacles—they are the substance of the work. Shown together, these prints make the case that photographs are not just images but objects, and that their material form is inseparable from their meaning.