By nature I'm inclined to alchemy, whether mixing pigments with sensitizer in the photo lab, making plant tinctures, or preparing ghee in the kitchen. Mixing, stirring and altering matter. Creating something from something else. I don't think there's a higher purpose in life than to create.

My work is the result of engaging two related art forms. One is photography and the other is printmaking. Both are about image-making. Both are about time. A photograph represents a moment, a mere fraction of a second in time. A finished gum bichromate print, a photographic image created with techniques from the 19th century, happens slowly, day after day, a layer at a time, until a week or a month or a year later -- you can’t ever be sure -- you say “That’s enough, it’s done now.” A solid month of gum printing might only result in ten finished prints.

The camera’s ability to capture moments in time represents both a strength and a weakness of the medium. Look at photographs by Cartier Bresson or Eugene Smith to see how those brief moments in time can surprise with the force of revelation. But those same moments in time, lifted (some call it stealing) from a greater continuum of both time and place record only that moment -- devoid of both a past and a future. That’s usually adequate; the majority of photographs are taken for private use where knowledge of the moment’s past and future are known by the photographer. Or, photos are taken for commercial or political use, where by nature the captured moments are more fleeting.

Moving the medium beyond the moment requires choosing an instant that will persuade a viewer to lend that moment a past and future, giving the image a life of its own. Truth and beauty are the places these moments inhabit.

I’m interested in the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi. It comes from the Buddhist assertion of impermanence and can be found in the simple, natural, ever-changing, imperfect, and incomplete world around us. Fall leaves are an expression of wabi sabi. So is rust. Beauty in decay. Impermanence.

Water too, along with all the trappings -- shoreline, beach, piers, and boats attract my eye. But it is our interaction with the force of the deep, the dark, the mysterious that keeps my attention. Life beyond the one we see with our eyes. It draws me close, I think, like a moth to the flame. Or a latent image in the dark of a camera awaiting revelation.

The gum bichromate printing process offers a kind of value-added layer to the photograph. Expressive and alternative printmaking of this type takes as its starting point the original moment captured in time. But then, layer by layer over the course of a week or a month or a year, something new is born, a gum print. To be sure, it bears the mark of that first photographic moment, but also bears something more that cannot be explained solely by the multiple layers of pigment applied.

When it all works just right, the original photograph, the original moment in time, becomes layered not only in pigments but also in a new kind of time. One that seems to carry an archetypal quality, like something from an old memory or a dream one can’t quite remember.

The alchemists implore practitioners of the art to "do their work with true imagination, not a fanciful one." I think they mean to approach their work with clarity of mind and to carry always the sense of higher purpose that any act of creation deserves. For me, brushing sensitizer and pigment onto artist's paper and making images that hold truth and beauty is one way I manifest the energy of creation in my life.

--- Alan Dehmer