TPS Exhibtions > Alternative Process

Alternative Process
A traveling exhibition juried by Christopher James: Author and Professor and Chair, The Art Institute of Boston.

ALTERNATIVE PROCESSES: A TRAVELING EXHIBITION
Amateur and professional photographers were invited to submit slides of their alternative processes works to the Texas Photographic Society (TPS), for the group’s Alternative Processes Traveling Exhibition. The Exhibition will travel throughout Texas for 2 years and be available for national exhibition sites.

Christopher James, and author of the Book of Alternative Photographic Processes will jury the competition. His book was the Winner of The Golden Light Technical Book of the Year Award in 2001. An exhibit catalogue will be published with exhibiting photographers receiving three copies and entrants receiving one. The catalogue will be sent to photography magazines, curators, museums and photography collector's.

Eligibility: All prints made using an alternative process are eligible and the exhibition is open to all subject matter. Examples of acceptable processes are albumen, collotype, kallitype, Lazertran, anthotype, Ziatype, carbon, Argyrotype, cyanotype, daguerreotype, gum bichromate, salted paper, photogravure, platinum and palladium, van dyke, hand applied emulsions, wet-plate collodion, and combinations of all of the above. No digital, c-prints, Polaroid® or solvent transfers, or gelatin silver prints will be accepted unless combined with an alternative process.

Alternative Processes Calendar
September 23
Entries due in San Antonio, TX.

October 31
Notice of accepted entries sent and posted on the TPS website.

November 29
Prints due in San Antonio, TX.

January
Alternative Processes exhibit opens in Odessa at the Options Gallery at Odessa College. Date to be determined.

Download the 2008 Alternative Prcoesses Call for Entries in text formatt.

To pay your Alternative Process entry fee from TPS secure website.

Juror's Pre-Jurying Comments:
This is such an amazing and exciting time in the history of photography. As it has done since the beginning, the medium is making a great sea change, a transition from the comfortable way it has been, incorporating the best of its traditions and history in concert with the new digital technologies. As a result, alternative process image making is undergoing, in a very real way, a renaissance.

The creative opportunities of alternative photographic processes have been, until recently, relatively unexplored territory for the contemporary artist… that’s changing rapidly. Alternative process image making has never been so popular and as the technical democracy of digital imaging dominates the majority of the medium, visually creative artists and photographers, of all ages, and disciplinary backgrounds, are actively exploring modes of photographic expression that are not solely dependent on commercially packaged materials. These artists are formulating, and hand applying, their own sensitizers, and emulsions, and returning to the exploratory roots of light-writing. They are embracing the possibilities of the hand-made print; the marriage of nineteenth century craft, science, and romanticism in concert with twenty-first century technologies and conceptual perceptions.

About the Juror:
Christopher James is an internationally known artist and photographer whose paintings and alternative process images have been exhibited in galleries and museums in this country and abroad. His work has been published and shown extensively, including shows in The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The George Eastman House, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His book, The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes (Delmar, 2001) has received unprecedented critical acclaim, was the winner of The Golden Light Technical Book of the Year award, and has become the standard reference text in alternative process image making. His second, and significantly expanded, edition of The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes: 2nd Edition was released in February 2008. Christopher, after 13 years at Harvard University, is currently Professor and Chair of Photography at The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University.

ALTERNATIVE PROCESSES: A TRAVELING EXHIBITION, 2003

TO VIEW IMAGES FROM THE ALTERNATIVE PROCESSES EXHIBIT, 2003

Select images from the 2003 Exhibition.

Carol Adleman
Cyanotype

Jill Skupin Burkholder
Bromoil

Peter Liepke
Bromoil from paper negative

Scott McMahon
Pinhole tintype

Rosira Correia Sasser
Polaroid emulsion peel on gold leaf