Nudes: A Romantic Encounter

The human figure is exquisitely beautiful and it was my intention to have that beauty resonate from the images of this body of work. Through this portfolio of work I have created picturesque romantic imagery similar to the nudes of the pictorial period.

In this nude study my subjects were illuminated using painting with light techniques, where LED flashlights covered with a diffusing material were used to paint light onto the models body giving a lovely soft glowing light to the skin. Whole body poses as well as close-ups of various parts of the body were used in the creation of this work. This helped produce some images that make the viewer question what they are actually looking at.

To further the artistic and romantic emotion that I was striving for in this portfolio, I converted the digital images to black and white digital negatives and then printed the images as salt prints. Salt printing, which dates back to the early 1800’s, is considered the first photographic printing process on paper. In this process, watercolor paper is coated with a salt solution, allowed to dry, and then coated with a silver nitrate solution. The black and white negative is then placed on the hand coated paper and exposed to light in a UV light box. Following exposure to light the paper is processed through a series of chemical baths in order to fix the image. Although this technique of printing is very time consuming I feel it brought an additional sense of romantic beauty to the portfolio that is not achievable in a digital medium.