In my previous article, I introduced Nick Carver. For his personal work he uses film to capture his images with medium and large format cameras and then edits and prints digitally to produce large panoramic prints.

Today, I bring you a photographer who does just the opposite – with a surprising twist.

I’m sure many of you don’t need to be introduced to Jeffery Conley. Jeff was born in New York State and studied photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He had planned to enter the profession in the standard way, moving to a big city as an assistant in the pictorial or advertising realms. But a trip to Yosemite while a student changed all that. He totally fell in love with the area. While there, he visited the Ansel Adams Gallery in the National Park and got a glimpse of Adams’ original prints. The hook was set.

As it turned out, the gallery was looking for someone to hire, so after graduating, he applied, drove cross country for the interview, and, in 1991, got the job. It was a pivotal move and the perfect landing spot for him after RIT. The job came with a small house, but what spectacular views: Half Dome in one direction, Yosemite Falls in the other! He stayed there for two years and was able to use Ansel’s darkroom, work on his photography, and meet his future wife.

He stayed in California for some twenty years, later becoming the Director and Curator of the second Ansel Adams Gallery in Pebble Beach. There he also taught photography – a valuable lesson in formulating his own thoughts about technique and what photography is.

By 2000 he had gotten some first representation and decided to take the leap into becoming a full-time landscape photographer, pursuing solely his own artistic visions. In 2006 he and his family left California and settled in Oregon.

In 2008, Jeff decided to try digital photography, went into the deep end, and bought a Canon system with 16 megapixels, which, of course, pales by today’s standards but cost him a fortune back then. He worked in both mediums and continues to use film today, but most of his image capture is now done digitally.

He is the consummate nature and landscape photographer, at one with the subject. One feels profound peace viewing his images and senses his deep respect and reverence for the natural environment.

Trees, water, rocks, snow, grasses, clouds, the exclusively black and white photographs are carefully composed and use light inventively, sometimes photographed in pre-dawn glow or even moonlight, using both hard contrasts and flattened grays.

Contrary to Nick Carver, however, Jeff uses digital cameras to capture his images but mainly prints using the almost 200-year-old hand-coated platinum/palladium processes! For many years he used film cameras for image capture and gelatin silver for printing, but with the improvements in digital sensors and considering the size of the negatives required for platinum/palladium printing, he now prefers digital cameras. He still prints with gelatin silver emulsions, as well as with archival pigments on Japanese Kozo paper, but he is particularly committed to the platinum printing process, first discovered in the 1830s and used widely through the 19^th century!

Jeff views himself as two things. One is the photographer. He travels around the world, making observations of things, harvesting his observations in photographs. The other, equally important, is the printer. This work in the darkroom gives the observations a voice, and a physical space to exist and be represented.

I was fortunate to be in Paris last April to visit the opening of an exhibit of his works at the Gallery Camera Obscura there. I was also able to meet him for coffee the next morning to talk about his work.

To view the photographs in person is revealing – and a moving experience. Many of the prints are large, up to 53×63 centimeters (20×24 inches). This is especially remarkable considering that platinum/palladium prints must be exposed as contact prints, so the negatives must be the same size as the print (more on that later)!

The printing is exquisitely beautiful. The blacks are not quite as deeply saturated as gelatin silver prints; they are more of a deep gray, which lends an overall softness. However, as a silver printer myself, I was particularly amazed by the delicate and extremely long tonal range between blacks and whites that is possible with this method, imparting a subtle luminance to the prints. And because he hand-brushes the thin emulsions onto the highest quality Japanese paper, there are no reflections, as with gelatin coatings, and the fine texture of the paper lends its own qualities to the image.

It was love at first sight, and I immediately wanted to begin learning platinum/palladium printing. However, our very enjoyable chat over coffee the next morning brought me back down to earth. That’s when I learned what is involved in the process. I mentioned above that this process requires contact printing. One cannot enlarge negatives by projection because the emulsion requires ultraviolet light. That is why when we see platinum prints by early photographers like Stieglitz, Steichen, or Weston, they are always small, with a maximum of 8×10 inches and as small as 2×2 inches, because that was the size of their negatives.

So how does Jeff manage to contact print his huge landscape prints? Brace yourself for a small technical barrage!

He first gently edits an image in Photoshop, then inverts the finished edit into a negative image, using contrast curves, adjusting it to produce an optimal negative image, then resizes the file up to the size needed for the print. Then he prints the negative file with a modified Epson printer, using special monochrome inks, onto transparent polyester film.

For the print medium, he coats a piece of paper with the liquid platinum/palladium emulsion using a special Japanese brush and other tools, letting the paper dry in darkness. When it is time to print, he re-humidifies the emulsion-coated paper (an important step) and inserts paper and negative into a custom-made unit that holds the negative and paper firmly together using a vacuum frame, then he exposes it in the unit for some four minutes using a large, even UV light source with safety features to protect his eyes from the UV light.

After that it goes into the developer until the desired contrast and saturation is achieved, then a further bath, then a wash, then left to dry.

In addition, there is the whole knowledge of chemistry, formulas, choice of papers, application of the emulsion onto the paper, and the development and finishing processes that must be mastered as well, all of which influence the final print.

And to top it off, he also does his own trimming, mounting, matting and framing. The results are spectacular.

I asked him if he was interested in any other genres of photography besides landscape. In fact, he is. He does street photography, urban landscapes, portraiture, but hasn’t shown it. He feels that he doesn’t yet have a body of work large or consistent enough to warrant making it public. One genre that he has never tried nor had interest in, is color photography, finding it to be a distraction to the eye.

Jeff’s art involves a painstaking, thoughtful process requiring precision, finesse, and nuance. That matches perfectly the Jeff Conley I met in Paris: gentle, kind, thoughtful, generous in interpersonal interaction, careful, exacting, philosophical, reverent in his approach to his art. I hope all of you have an opportunity to stand in front of his work someday and contemplate the observations of this sensitive artist.

Here is a video where he explains the platinum/palladium process as well as his thoughts on photography. And here is Jeff’s website and Instagram page.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Smith is a professional choral and orchestral conductor and an amateur photographer and linguist. His photographic interests are in analog medium and large formats. Born and raised in the USA, he has lived as a dual-national in Switzerland for 40 years.

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