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The Photo-cut Printing Process

Charlotte Parr-Burman

Profile picture of Charlotte Parr-Burman

Charlotte's work has a strong focus on process-led methodologies and an ongoing research practice on the challenges of depicting the public realm. She studied Architecture before completing her MA in Graphic Communication Design at Central St Martins.

Charlotte's work has a strong focus on process-led methodologies and an ongoing research practice...

The Photo-cut Printing Process is a new method of photographic reproduction using the analogue medium of reductive woodcut printmaking. The prints and photographs depict the Tottenham Marshes, over the last six months a long-term sustained engagement with the place has supported and justified the time and labour required for this slow production method. 

Final work

  • Twelve prints are hanging on washing line style frame, the prints get gradually darker and the image gets clearer.
  • Same as previous image except there is a ladder in front of the prints with a blurred figure shown stood on it and adjusting the prints.
  • Same as previous image except there is a ladder in front of the prints with a blurred figure shown stood on it and adjusting the prints.
A finished woodcut print is lying on a drying rack, the print shows two geese and is black and white.

Printmaking and photography have a strongly intertwined past, print has always had a key role in reproducing photographs for mass distribution. I have developed a process of photographic reproduction, using reductive woodcut printmaking, that challenges the seemingly opposing natures of photography’s instantaneous mechanical process and the hours of skilled work hand rendering into wood to create a print.

The Process:

  1. Expose 35mm photographs onto plywood in the darkroom using photo-emulsion.
  2. Cut areas away from these wood photographs, beginning with the lightest tones of grey present.
  3. Build up the print through many layers of gradually darkening black ink.

The woodcut print of the photograph takes days rather than seconds to develop. Each detail is carved out by hand, thousands of critical decisions of mark-making work together to build up an image. Photography is tied to depiction in a way that no other medium is. The mechanical system of seeing captures everything with no filter, but its exact visual tracing can fall short of truly representing how we use and understand places. Through a labour-intensive process of reproduction, the project seeks to test the balance between visual accuracy and emotional response and to consider how the depiction of space can go beyond sight to capture the feeling of a place.

The ambiguity offered by the print's final appearance, and the labour of their production visible within them, gives space for the viewer to project their own experience of the places they depict.

Research and process

Photograph of two geese, one standing on the bank of a river and the other standing on a partially submerged boat in the water.
  • Photograph showing ink roller and ink on the workshop table.
  • Photograph showing wood with photograph exposed onto it lined up to registration in printing press.
  • Photograph showing drying racks in the printmaking studio.

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The Photo-cut Printing Process

The Photo-cut Printing Process is a new method of photographic reproduction using the analogue medium of reductive woodcut printmaking. The prints and photographs depict the Tottenham Marshes, over the last six months a long-term sustained engagement with the place has support...

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