Site Sight Unseen
While wandering the streets of Havana, I was drawn to photograph an ordinary grouping of dried plants falling against a wall. This simple scene created an intense emotional connection in me that persisted, so instead of making just one or two negatives as planned, I made over thirty. These Havana negatives became the genesis of my Site Sight Unseen series.
On my first day of working with the negatives one unfixed print remained in the darkroom sink all day, unnoticed. As it lay there, chemical interactions continued to work between the gelatin silver paper, light, and the developer. The dramatic effects and unexpected beauty of the print that I discovered opened a new way of working in which process, experimentation, trusting intuition, and moment by moment attention to detail took precedence over the traditional, orderly darkroom procedure.
To recreate that chance occurrence, I purposely pour, spray, and drip darkroom solutions onto exposed gelatin silver paper, monitoring the print in process over a day-long alchemical dance that moves back and forth from studio to darkroom. During this process the ordinary is transformed into richly layered other-worldly silver gelatin prints.
Jane Olin, 2016
