Author: mblum6180_l6d6qy

In April 2020, The Morning Call published a piece by Glenn Koehler about how Lehigh Valley visual artists were adapting their work during the early months of the pandemic—navigating canceled shoots, paused classes, and the constraints of social distancing while still trying to keep making things.

I was included as one of the local photographers adjusting to that sudden shutdown. The article discusses how commercial work largely stalled, and how I shifted attention inward—digging through archives, rediscovering images to print, and spending time in the darkroom. It also highlights my interest in historical print processes, including palladium printing and carbon printing, and my ongoing effort to combine modern image-making with older, hands-on methods—essentially merging today’s cameras with the printing techniques of the past.

The story also features other Lehigh Valley photographers and educators finding new ways to stay creative and connected, from remote teaching strategies to experimenting with alternative processes and online resources.

Source: The Morning Call — “New times, new techniques: Lehigh Valley visual artists are finding creative ways to work” (Glenn Koehler, April 2, 2020)

In October 2019, Lehigh Valley Press featured my exhibition Windows of the Past: Lehigh County, presented in the David E. Rodale Gallery at The Baum School of Art.

The show brought together 17 images of historic Lehigh County locations, with subjects selected from sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The project was built around an experiment I’d set for myself that year: photographing local architecture and landmarks while exploring how different historic photographic printing processes change the emotional “time signature” of an image.

The work blended modern capture with older methods. Some images were made digitally, others on film using vintage cameras, and the final prints were produced using a range of traditional processes including cyanotype, tintype, gum bichromate, albumen, silver gelatin, and palladium. One example discussed in the piece describes creating a digital negative from a modern image and then producing an albumen print in the darkroom—mixing contemporary tools with 19th-century chemistry.

As part of the exhibition, I also offered community programming at the Baum School, including a collaborative cyanotype workshop, along with tintype portrait sittings on select dates during the run of the show.

Read the original article by Ed Courrier (Lehigh Valley Press): https://www.lvpnews.com/20191025/matthew-blum-windows-in-baum-exhibit-4

In November 2018, Lehigh Valley Press published a review of the feature film Billboard, written by Paul Willistein.

Billboard is a Lehigh Valley–shot comedy inspired by the real-life “billboard sitters” radio promotion contest from the early 1980s. The film reimagines that local media spectacle through a fictional radio station storyline, using humor to poke at attention economics, hype, and the strange feedback loop between an audience and the machine trying to entertain it.

I served as Director of Photography on Billboard, and the review specifically called out the cinematography for supporting the film’s mix of exterior and interior scenes across the region.

Read the original Lehigh Valley Press review:

https://www.lvpnews.com/20181104/movie-review-billboard-lampoons-radio-station-stunt-8