Codex Maleficarum - handmade book

I hadn't mentioned it here, but I spent some time working on a new handmade book.  Completely unrelated to my Alchemical book series, this is called Codex Maleficarum, a work regarding witches and witchcraft.  The title is a reference to earlier books on the subject, including Malleus Maleficarum (from the 15th century) and Compendium Maleficarum (from the 17th).  Continuing in this tradition, I've treated the material similarly by compiling information from other sources and editing it to fit my own beliefs and biases.

The book is 96 pages and hardbound (approximately 11x11 inches).  It includes quite a few original photographs from my series "Earth Magic" (most of which I've not shown publicly yet), along with text and images collected from numerous sources. 

Please forgive the varying quality of these snapshots.

productive times

I've been able to get a lot done over the past few days.

On Friday I had the opportunity to go through a deceased man's photo estate.  Then I acquired a power supply for my second 4-track cassette recorder (which I got for free from a yard sale in the neighborhood).  I played around with listening to some of my older recordings simultaneously while making dinner.  Talk of a new music project.  Kicking around some ideas.

On Saturday I was able to get into the color darkroom to print the full sized 16x20 photographs for the "Symbiosis" series.  I got impatient and worked on two different photographs simulatenously on two separate enlargers.  Here is one stage of my printing notes:

This got considerably more hectic shortly after this was taken.

I was able to get great prints of the first four images for this series.  I'm very excited to get started painting on them.

This morning Jane and I woke up and had some iced coffee, then I set things up to take wet plate photographs.  We took several photos with the "Earth Magic" series in mind (which I've been offhandedly calling my "witch" series).  The first couple of images were a bit foggy until I realized that I needed to modify my chemistry to fit the hot weather here.

Then Jane put on her new dress that she got last weekend.  She didn't even realize until later that it's covered in witches.  Synchronicity!

Well, maybe they're just ladies harvesting things.  But still - check out those pointy hats!

When using the wet plate collodion process, you get to use all kinds of fun chemicals.  One of them is silver nitrate, which makes your glass plate sensitive to light.  If you don't wear gloves, you get black fingers.  So I have black fingers.

Cel phone photo taken while thinking of a better photograph from the past.  I think it was Edward Weston holding hands with one of his lady partners.  The identities were blurry at first, until you realized that what first appeared to be nail polish was actually his (Weston's?) fingernails stained black from developing prints in amidol.  Does anyone know of this photograph?  I can't find it anywhere.  Anyhow, this is my and Jane's hands after taking photographs in the kitchen.