White Metal

The little I know about Palladium printing I learned from my neighbor Alice Garik who I met because of the interest we share in washing soda, which she uses for polishing silver and I use to make laundry soap. One of her Palladium prints appears above. She uses some kind of wide Japanese brush to apply the palladium emulsion smoothly and evenly to an almost impossibly thin, delicate membrane. I crack up imagining myself attempt that, but it's easy to imagine Alice, who is preternaturally careful and aware, pulling it off. Then she lays the negative over the delicate paper and exposes it to sunlight. That one uses natural light in this sort of printing is what surprised me the most.

When Alice gets a break from her professional portraiture she devotes herself to fixing images of raptors, swans, children, her friends, bee hives and various lyrical scenes into the darkness of the lustrous metal named for Pallas Athena and the asteroid visible in the skies of 1803 when William Hyde Wollston discovered the metal. More of her work here.