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