Sandy King is a photo historian and landscape artist, working with large format and digital negatives. He combines historical alternative processes with new technology – using film to capture his images, scanning the images to produce digital negatives, preparing the image for print in Photoshop, and then printing with old processes, such as carbon or palladium. He lectures, gives workshops, and has written numerous articles and books, one of which is a book on carbon printing, The Book of Carbon and Carbro. King currently lives in South Carolina, where he spent his career teaching at Clemson. In his retirement, he continues to work producing prints using alternative processes.
I was drawn to his work because of his explorations of alternative processes, particularly platinum/palladium. However, in my research, I came across carbon printing, which has similar but expanded qualities to platinum palladium printing. I plan to further explore this process at some time, since it provides superb tonal quality, great density range, and excellent shadow detail. Because the carbon tissue is handmade, the color range is limitless. The process is archival, and the final image can be printed on any surface – i.e., paper, canvas, glass, or metal.
I appreciate the crisp almost surreal rendering of his Spanish Cork Tree landscape, and the exquisite detail of the abstraction of an image from China. I am also drawn to his work because he uses images he makes during his travels to make his art.
