PAULINE DUFFY - RESEARCH PROJECT FURTHER PHOTOGRAPHS

I have been working with black and white photographs and started printing them on different papers, bought museum quality etching paper, sugar cane paper, photo rag paper and photo pearl paper and started printing in black and white, what a difference compared to ordinary matt photo paper, the print just sinks into the image, when I then paint over the images with gouache paint the difference is more noticeable. I have discovered that some of the black and white images look so good on the better quality paper that I dont want to paint over them!  What I have done is keep a black and white pristine copy and printed another copy which I have painted over so the comparison is more noticeable, I attach herewith an original colour photo taken in St. Stephens Green, I also attach a black and white copy and two photographs which I have painted over, each image is so different and yet it is the same image, this demonstrates what I wanted, showing how by painting I can alter an image so that each image is different and yet because I paint them rather than using photoshop to enhance them I feel there is more personal input into each image.  The most interesting discovery for me has been how amazing some of the images are in black and white particularly when using some of the heavier photograph papers, the images have an olde worlde quality and could have been taken a century ago, this seems to be because the density of the papers museum etching is 350gsm and photo rag 320gsm .

Pauline Duffy December 2009