Landscape as Autofiction

Looking around for other potential sources of plant phenols in the Winter months, I noticed how much lichen had been blown form the branches of trees and the top of fence posts locally. I remembered reading about the untapped medicinal properties of lichen and so did a little more research into their active constituents. They are indeed a rich source of polyphenols. Lichens can be found in profusion around my local area, but it is very slow growing and so I’m keen to preserve it. For this reason I will only take that which has been blown free and no longer growing. I gathered up a small bag full of this wind-blown lichen and it proved particularly effective for both negatives and prints.

Searching for other ingredients to try, I noticed all the shrivelled up and partly rotted rosehips on a reverted rosebush in the front garden. Since rosehips are so rich in vitamin C, I wondered if these would provide both the phenolic compounds and the ascorbic acid required for a working developer. I tried a couple of batches, increasing in strength, in which sodium carbonate was added to a ‘rosehip tea’, but no vitamin C was added. The results were interesting, but unstable and inconsistent, until supplemented with extra vitamin C. It could just be that these hips were too old and withered, having wintered on the bush, and the vitamin C content had degraded. I figured it would be interesting to repeat this experiment again, with fresh rosehips, later in the year.

With Rosehips on hold for the season, I was curious what other evergreen leaves I might be able to find locally that would be rich in polyphenols.

The results from the Rosehip developer had reminded me of some of the lith prints I had recently been making. This got me wondering if there were any similarities in the two processes.

Since starting to use my own plant-based developers, I’d not been making lith prints. I love the quality that lith produces, but it’s a fairly toxic process. So much so that, when I started working with lith developer, I installed extra ventilation in my darkroom to extract the fumes. Still keen to make more lith prints, I searched for alternatives to commercially produced developer, but couldn’t find evidence of anything like this. This is why I decided to research making my own plant-based lith developer. My experiments into the idea of plant-based ‘lith prints’ led me to Cherry Laurel and Rhododendron.

The developer I had been using is made by the German company, Moersch Photochemie. I was pretty uninformed about the exact make up of lith developer. However, Wolfgang Moersch, provides some helpful information in his guide to lith printing: “Highly diluted hydroquinone developer causes coloured image tones if the print is excessively overexposed, especially if the oxidation products are not captured by sulphite, but instead take part in building up the image. Lith developer contains only one developing substance, hydroquinone.”

With this this knowledge I set about researching naturally occurring sources of hydroquinone. I found a couple of interesting research papers that suggested potential plant material with which to begin my experiments. Antioxidant Activity of Natural Hydroquinones, describes Hydroquinone as a “phenolic structure that appears in secondary plant metabolites present in species with different phylogenies, with the most prominent taxa being found in Ericales, Lamiales and Asterales”. Quantitative Determination of Arbutin and Hydroquinone
in Different Plant Materials by HPLC added Saxifragaceae and Rosaceae as sources of Hydroquinone.

Calluna Vulgaris, or Ling Heather, is in the Ericaceae family and would be my most obvious first plant to try, as it proliferates all around this are. However, at this time of the year it is quite brown, having not yet started its fresh growth, and I thought it might not be sufficiently potent.

I did find a very abundant supply locally of the evergreen Cherry Laurel (Prunus lauracerasus), which is in the Rosaceae family, and this was used for my initial tests.

In hindsight, I think it was a bit of a reach to term this “plant-based lith printing”, and my pseudo-scientific research was very shaky. However, what I did learn from these, and the previous Rosehip experiments, was what exciting results could be obtained by decreasing the amount, or even completely omitting, ascorbic acid from the developer.

By the time I had concluded my misguidedly optimistic ‘plant-based lith’ tests, Spring shoots had started to push up more green foliage in the garden. Thus followed prints made with the leaves of Aquilegia, Jacob’s Ladder and Sorrel.

With Spring in abeyance, I made up a mix using the dead-headed flowers of Daffodils. This wasn’t as successful as I’d anticipated.

Now that there was so much greenery to test out as the basis for a developer, I thought it only sensible to commit to being a little more strategic in my selection of plant material. I considered the Goat Willow tree in our front garden. Knowing that Willow is a famous source of salicylic acid I gathered its leaves. This gave me some of my most interesting results yet. I found that omitting the addition of ascorbic acid, or using a very slight amount, created some wonderful ‘clouds of ambiguity’ around the central subject of the prints. Often, when the right ratio of sodium carbonate to Willow leaves were combined with the right kind of paper, it could create a kind of solarisation similar to the so-called Sabattier effect.

Since discovering the kind of results I can achieve with Goat Willow leaves, I’ve been trying to build on this with other leaves and flowers, and combinations, in order to get the best results for all the different kinds of paper I am trying to print with.