Kline's Salt Prints Exhibited at UVM
Visual arts faculty member Jonathan Kline’s exhibition at the University of Vermont showcased 17 prints produced using one of the many historic photographic processes that he’s dedicated his recent career to preserving.
Working with film exposed in self-constructed pinhole cameras, Kline used the salted paper process—one of the first photographic printing processes from the mid-19th century—to create a series of 20x24-inch prints that trace the sun’s path across the sky.
“In this project, process and content coincide,” Kline says. “The sun was photographed continuously over the course of one day via pinhole, and printed out in the same amount of time with the sun as the source of exposure.”
Kline was also recently invited to share his expertise in historic photographic processes with NYU graduate students at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he spoke on a practice known as photogenic drawing. In 2008, he completed a three-year photographic history project with the Met’s Photographic Conservation Department. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project involved recreating five different variants on the paper negative process, a method used by French and British photographers in the 1840s and ’50s.