Joachim Froese interview
Amanda
Joachim Froese is a Brisbane-based photographer and teacher of photography. And I had the privilege of meeting Joachim recently at a workshop at the Maude Street Gallery in Newstead. Welcome, Joachim.
Joachim
Thanks for having me. Amanda.
Amanda
The concept behind the workshop was salt printing, which is a technique that you often use for your work. Can you walk us through a bit about this, what it is, what salt printing is, and its very interesting history?
Joachim
Well, salt printing basically constitutes the oldest photographic process printing process on paper. It goes back to 1839 when Henry Fox Talbot presented the process in England. It's a contemporary of the daguerreotype, which is a small image on metal which was presented by Jacques Daguerre in Paris. So, it constitutes while the daguerreotype had initially a big heyday and everybody loved it because it was sharp and beautiful and shiny. The. The salt printing process eventually became what we know as modern photography because it's based on a positive negative process. So how does it work? The name already gives it away. It's actually a salted piece of paper, which means you have a piece of paper which you float on a salted Salt solution of 3% Salt solution and that ends up with a fine crust of salt on the paper. It's sodium chloride, basically table salt, what you put on your fish and chips. So, once you have sorted the paper, you can actually make it light-sensitive by applying another layer of silver nitrate. A 12% solution of silver nitrate and silver nitrate and sodium chloride react to silver chloride. And that is a highly light-sensitive surface.
So that is basically the process in a nutshell, how you sensitise your papers, how you make them light sensitive. Then you need either a UV box which, which has UV light or sunshine. Because the paper is not sensitive to the the whole range of light; it's only sensitive to UV lighting. So, once you put the paper in the sun, it turns black.
And then the next step, what you need to do to do a sole print is that you create a digital negative, a what we call a contact negative. The negative needs to be the same size as the the print. That contact negative goes on top of the prepared paper. The whole shabong goes into the sun; it turns black where the negative is white, and you have a positive image. And that's it, very roughly in a nutshell. Then you have to process it, you wash it, you put it into another salt solution, you wash it again, you go tone it, you fix it, you wash out the fixer thoroughly. So, it is a very long process. As Amanda can vouch probably pretty much a whole day to make a small print. Yeah, that's salt printing in a nutshell.
Amanda
Yeah. So that was actually something that surprised me in the workshop. Is it's not that I expected to make a handful of prints, but we got there, we turned up, and it's like, no, this is an all-day thing. You're going to be standing with your image all day. And and I guess that that is a really. That is something that we don't often have access to, I think, in modern society. Is this like the slow. It's almost like slow art. It's like you're not just. Yeah. And I'm curious: what drew you to this form of printing in the first place?
Joachim
Well, the reason why I ended up with salt printing is that I also have an academic background. I've been teaching photography for more than 25 years at universities, mainly in Australia but also in Germany. And I'm also at the moment an honorary lecturer at the University of Queensland. And my area is the history of photography. So, I researched the early history of the medium, and that was my initial interest because I was reading about all these very old processes, in particular, the salt print, which is the beginning. So eventually I thought, well, I'll give it a try. I have to say also that my practical side of my photography career has always been very much darkroom-based. But I used modern papers, I used the modern black and white papers which you buy in the shop, and you put under the enlarge and you work in a safelight environment which is get very different to what I do now with the sword prints. But that's really my way of working in a way I just research the theory, I research the history, I research the practice, I research the processes, and I often teach them. So, the whole thing of being an academic, a kind of historian, a practitioner, all over the years has merged into this amorphous whole thing, which is my, which is my practice. But when I say practice, it's also the theory behind it. You know, I'm in the classroom, and as you say, it's a long time of nothing happening because you rock a tray for something like an hour, and there's a lot of time to think.
So, I'm often think why I'm doing things, what I want to do next, thinking about the concepts that evolve. And so, it's this, I mean, I guess it's the in the catchphrase in academic teaching at the moment is practical or practice-led research which I'm not always keen on. All these buzzwords. But I think it has got an interesting application because practicing as an artist and thinking at the same time is is very interesting headspace, and I really enjoy being in it.
Amanda
No, absolutely. Like the, the reflective component as, as you're going. And it's almost like an experimentation, too, isn't it?
Joachim
Totally. And, and I actually have to say that the more I do it, the more experimental my work becomes, because what I'm doing at the moment, and I don't want to run ahead with it with your interview, but I'm actually now using salt prints which are unfixed, which means that if you don't fix them, they still remain light sensitive to, or they remain sensitive to UV light, which gives you a lot of scope to play with because you can look at them under incandescent dimmed interior light, but you can't put them out in the sun. So. But you have an image which is perfectly stable if you don't expose it to light too often. But if you look at it too much, it actually starts to darken and eventually disappear.
Amanda
Yeah, and I'm going to ask you a little bit more about that in a second. But it actually made me think about almost like conservation and biodiversity. The more access we have to places, the more we can look at the animals. Maybe there's a bit of a cost in potentially losing them at the same time. So could you tell me a little bit about your. It's the Mars project that you're talking about, isn't it?
Joachim
This is the Mars project, which is my current work, which was on show just recently at Jan Manton Gallery here in Brisbane. So, it came down about a week ago. So, what I do is I go to the NASA website and download all the images that rovers take on Mars. And I have to say that I've been always fascinated by the Mars images. I think the first rover started around 2004 there. And since then, I've been hooked, always sitting on computer and looking at these images from a distant planet because I find it absolutely stunningly amazing that there is, that there is that we have the ability to send the camera to another planet and, and, and, and record it and send us pictures of it.
And over the years, the cameras got better and better, and now you're getting files which are on the website which are actually quite large. So, you need to have a certain data image which is a certain size that you can print it, but you have that now. So, I download these images and then play around with them in Photoshop and eventually I, and after then I create my digital negative as we did in the course with you, and then I print them as a sole print.
So, what I'm, what my whole work at the moment is about in a nutshell. And that's been this case since basically since 2019, that I work with this really, really old process with, with the oldest process, the beginning of photography really. And I combine it with the latest digital technology we have. And you can't have much more up-to-date digital technology than a freaking robot on another planet that takes some pictures. So that fascinates me. And the thing is also that we always talk about photography, and we say, oh, we say, oh, this is photography. But actually, photography is just an umbrella term for so many different technologies, approaches, and to combine them and explore them and experiment with them really gives you a rich meadow to harvest for conceptual ideas.
Amanda
And your work with Mars, so you aren't obviously printing every image. So, when you choose an image, what story is it telling you that makes you say, that's one that I want to put onto paper?
Joachim
That's a good question. I mean, I think that's- that's a bit of a gut feeling. It also depends. I mean, because I work in series, I look, I have few images which straight away, I know, yes, these are beautiful. It's a beautiful, you know, hillside and that's, that's a beautiful valley of waves or something like that looks like a desert scene.
So, I had had my images, some of my images straight away and then you just look at the entire series and you, you think what, what complements this image and what complements that image? And then, for a while, I was drawn to the tracks the rover left on Mars because it looks back and photographs its own tracks. And that was really, I found that very interesting in the sense that you actually, that it photographs its own presence up there. And it also gives you this idea of a colonising machine which, which really, which the whole thing is about what, what's, what's what it's about. So, so yeah, it's an, it's a, it's an organic process in a way.
As I always work in series, I don't look at one individual image, I look at the whole thing. And then I also, from a certain point onwards, I think about a gallery display when I actually have a. Preparing my work for a show. And I really think, I look at the space of the gallery and that establishes obviously how many images I need.
And you know, and I then I think about one that sits nicely in the corner by itself, and then I look at pairs, etc, etc.
Amanda
Right. So. So now I'm imagining that you have this big file folder that's just full of images from Mars, and then you're sitting, you put them. Maybe you'd have them all together and maybe looking at them side by side and changing the order of them…
Joachim
Yeah.
Amanda
Is that how it works?
Joachim
Yeah. Yes, so far. I often make little, little just, just inkjet prints just to, to have an idea about the, about the image and how they look next to each other. Because working on the computer is, in that way, a little bit difficult with digital images because you can't really see how they sit together. I mean, you can make a bit of a clumsy storyboard, but it doesn't, for me, it doesn't work quite well. So, I also want to get a feeling for the idea of a print, you know, how it looks in changed material conditions. So, yeah, it's a process that's constantly changing. And I mean, my next show will look different. I will actually add more images. I will leave some out and. Yeah, but that really is. I guess that's where artistic gut feeling comes into it, or intuition or whatever you want to call it. You just know when something works together. I mean, there's obviously compositional elements which you can go by, but, but, but yeah, at some stage you just, you look at it and just, it just feels as if it's talking to you as a, as a, as a whole.
Amanda
Some of what you were just saying reminded me a bit of the writing process as well. When you're working on a story, like I have a friend who's working on a story collection at the moment and thinking about the way that the different, the different chapters, the different stories sit next to each other and whether some should be there or be not there and what they do, both adjacent to each other, but also separate.
Joachim
Yeah, I mean, I mean, all the creative processes are ultimately related, and you work to the same principles. You have an idea, you have a brainstorm, you research, you get. Lots of stuff comes out, you know, you spill it out. You've got this whole pile of things, you. And then, then you just push, pull back and look for the essence. I think, I think the, the, the, the creative process in its in its nature is always going from, you know, idea over, gathering, then, then refining and then preparing for, for, or an output of some kind. It's all the same.
Amanda
You make it sound so easy.
Joachim
Well, it's not rocket science. I mean, well, that's one of the things you do when you're a teacher. You, you, you, you, you boil it down to the essence and then present it. But no, I mean, of course, it's, it's not rocket. It's, it's not, it's not that easy because because you you gather a lot of experience and, and you also know how you personally work because there are obviously different, different, different approaches by by different individuals. But also, I think you can actually, like I just did, I think you can condense this because if you, otherwise you could not teach it. If you just say, if you were teaching it, like saying, oh, we all, you know, genius artists and you just do whatever you like and it'll come out great, then that's not teaching.
Amanda
I think that's actually one of the great things that I took out of the workshop with you was I had never, and I'm almost 50 years old, and I had never really thought about how photographs happen. Like how the image gets from some magic inside my camera onto some piece of paper that I can hold in my hand.
And it was really amazing how that process of thinking about, okay, well you need to sensitise the paper and then you need to put the paper in light, you know, and the, and then the pattern of the, the negative creates the image that you want. And and it was just a very powerful moment for me, to sort of. It just unsettled all of these assumptions that I had about that particular kind of art.
Joachim
Yeah, well, you make me, you make me very happy when you say that my workshop must have hit a.
Amanda
It did. And that's another thing I'd love to chat with you about because then I began to realise, in part because there were all of those books that we could look through, how many different kinds of processes you can use to make photographs on paper. Can you talk to us a little bit about some of the other processes that you have used that are.
Joachim
How much time have we got till tomorrow? I mean, there is many; I mean the whole, the whole 19th century is, is one, one process after the other, and they're at some stage they all exist next to each other and, and, and develop from one end to the next. And there is quite a few.
There is, I mean basically every, every, every metal salt can, is light sensitive. So, you can actually use, you can use metal, you can use iron salts, which is the cyanotype. You can use silver salt, which is the most common one, which, which is number of processes amongst, in the salt print. But also, modern photography, what you buy in the shop still. You can use platinum. It's. Platinum printing is a maybe the most royal of all the processes. It's incredibly expensive because it's a very rare metal, but it's very, very archival because it's one of the most stable metals. And and the prints have got beautiful, beautiful density and and a long range of density. So, you can actually very, you can get super fine gradations of of of between black and white.
The salt print is actually a very rough one because it hasn't got, maybe you know, we talked about it how on a scale from, from pure black to pure white, it really just captures, maybe you could say almost four or five tones and, and that's it. While platinum has got endless to. And that's beautiful.
You could, you can print on metal what people did. You could, can print on glass. You can, you've got oil bromides where you can. Where you, where you actually dissolve some the light-sensitive material into, into some into an oil base which, which then looks very painterly. You can smear it. You can. So that was where the pictorialists at the end of the 19th century, their favourite medium was the brom oil amongst others. Yeah, so. So, it really is; it is very much an. Where do you start? Where do you end? It's the cameras change you how, how you made the negatives. First, it was paper, then it was glass, then it was film and then eventually it was roll film, and it became smaller and the images became sharper. Yeah, it's, it's really. And we haven't, we haven't even mentioned colour yet. So. But the thing is, what I am fascinated about these old processes, like you said, they are laid bare. You actually understand how a light-sensitive surface reacts and how you can make it light-sensitive. And that's, I think the fundamentally different to the black boxes we have today where our phone does so many things.
It's just black box principle. We know it does everything, but we have not the faintest idea how it does it. And and I think that is really from my from my perspective, a very dangerous place to be in that we actually giving our whole lives over to all these processes which are hidden, and we have got no idea how they work. While actually we actually we live in. In, in, in an, in an environment where everything is connected. And and I think having these chemical processes laid bare gives you also an understanding about how things are connected and how things. How the world outside works because it's not too far from light sensitive surface to photosensitivity of plants. I really enjoy that, if you want to call it analog, organic way of working.
Amanda
And a lot of your work does connect directly with nature. Yes. So how do you feel? So this is something that we talk a lot about actually at the magazine is, you know, in what ways can we use art to connect people with nature? What are, what are your thoughts on that whole big question? Where do you, what can art give us for the natural world?
Joachim
Oh, that's a, that's a, that's a big, big and broad question. I mean, I did my PhD in two, finished it in 2017 and, and the topic was human categorisations of nature and how we use photography to, to how photography is embedded in this process of categorizing nature and how photography is embedded in our understanding of nature.
And obviously, you have the beautiful landscapes that show us wild and endangered places and we look at them and we feel, oh my God, this is something we need to preserve. And so this has been the most obvious and the longest-standing connection between photography and the environmental movement. So, I mean, Ansel Adams was an environmentalist with the Sierra, involved with the Sierra Club and, and there is a long history of that Dombrovskis in Australia, Tasmania. He was involved with a Franklin River protests and, and his photographs of pristine Tasmanian wilderness were in incredibly powerful way to make everybody aware of what is lost if this dam goes ahead. So, so that is a long-standing relationship. My, my, my, my, approach comes from slightly different direction because I actually in a nutshell, my PhD was based on very much on, on the findings of the biologist, 19th, 20th century biologist, Jakob von Uexküll. He was a biologist who looked at sentient worlds. And he brought up this theory, which also very much in connection with bio semiotics, that every living being creates its sentient world around itself, whether that is a basic flea or a tick or humans. And the more complex the, the, the, the, the being is, the more, the more complex the world is in which it lives.
So ultimately, I think you can, you could can say that, that we actually might share one planet. We might, obviously we share this. We are bound to the same biology and the same, the same system. But within this system, we live in different worlds. And I think that is a very powerful way of looking at, at nature but also at society. Because if we live, if we live at in individual worlds, we actually must accept that people think differently. We must accept that people do things differently. And my prime example always is that if I talk, I'm an atheist, but if I talk to a believer, there is no point saying there is no God because, in the world of the believer, there clearly is a God. And you can't deny it. I mean, they see God, they, they feel him or her or whatever, whatever that thing is they call God. But you can't, you can't. I think it's simply not very, not very, not a very good thing to do to say, well, there is no God. You know, we have to settle it. You know, in your world, there is, in my world, there isn't. In these in this particular thing, our worlds differ, but we actually also have to accept that these worlds are, these other worlds are around us. And then, then I think we don't. You're pulling radicalism, the carpet under its feet, you know, I mean, because we actually, if we understand that we did that and accept that, I think that is a fundamental, fundamental basis to get on with each other.
Amanda
And also, there's that, you know, finding those points where the perspectives intersect. Right. So maybe, maybe on religion, there's a difference of ideals, but on the beauty of the Franklin River, there's common ground.
Joachim
Yes. But also, you need to set your priorities right, you know, because a lot of people would also find a lot of beauty in a dishwasher and an air conditioner that use a lot of power. And we can't actually, you know, that's the other thing which I often struggle with. You know, when, when people want to have everything, they want to have the beautiful Franklin River, they want to have, but they also want to have all the mod cons of, of daily life. And, and eventually, especially when we've got, I don't know how many, 11 billion people or whatever we got coming towards, we can't have it all. And, and, and we're coming to the end of the capacity of the planet. And and that is a very simple scientific fact. So, we actually have to make choices.
We can't have our third. We can't have the lifestyle, lifestyle we live and all our natural diversity because one has to give. And and when you actually distribute the CO2 allocations for everybody equally on the planet, I think it's a crazy number. But when you look at that distribution over a year, Australians use up their resources by, I think, I'm not sure what exactly numbers are, by something like after 69 days and. Yes. And from then on, we live on borrowed CO2. Yes, we have to face the hard numbers. And in a way, this environmental debate locks back to my Mars work because now there is all these people who say, well, we have other planets we can go to. And we fucked up this one, so let's go to the next one. And endless resources. There's just another probe on the moon that looks for minerals there. And.
Amanda
And it doesn't look too bad. It's just kind of like Phoenix, Arizona, right?
Joachim
Yes, exactly. And that's. That's really. But, but actually, that's. This is the question. It looks like Arizona. It looks like a landscape we can walk through. And let's face this. The only reason why people are actually lured into going up there is because they have seen the photograph. And it. Here, it works exactly like the beautiful landscape where. Where everybody says, oh, on Earth. You know, we look at the beautiful waterfalls. All right, we want to go there. You know, this is beautiful. And then now we see all these seductive images of Mars and we. Yes, we want to go there, but actually, my question is, is it a landscape? We are looking at? What is a landscape? A landscape is connected to our haptic feelings. Our landscape is connected to the idea of. We breathe the fresh air, we touch the grass, we touch the rocks. But the rocks in my images, you cannot touch because you cannot walk the valley, I'm showing you because if you would, you know, your blood would boil within seconds.
Yes, maybe there will be a human up there in a spacesuit. But. But what kind of experience is that? It's not. It's not. It's. Yeah, it's not a landscape. And hence, the idea that my images are deliberately designed to disappear. They are. They are. Actually. I. By doing that, they end up being a mirage. What we're looking at is a mirage. So that is the connection, what I'm looking at. And I find it really super. And this is how my brain works in the darkroom when I'm rocking trays, you know; this is all the thoughts that go through my head, and everything always comes in circle. And I fundamentally believe that there is no free gift. We always have to pay for something at some stage. You never get something for free, whatever it is. But we. And and that is not a bad thing because we. But it just means we have to make deliberate choices. We have to be aware of our consumptions. We have to be aware of our impact. We have to be aware of our carbon footprint. And I'm not arguing, let's all go back to, you know, living, traveling the world with horse carts. But. But we have to really look at the cost balance and ask some hard questions as a society, as humans now.
Amanda
We have to remember that there are costs. Always. I was just having a conversation with someone earlier today about ChatGPT and about that. People don't always assume that there are costs involved with the program, with using it or with, you know, with how easy it can make things. But you have to if you want if you want to use that technology effectively, you have to put in probably more work than you would have to put in to just do the thing in the first place. I think.
Joachim
Yeah, probably. I mean, yeah, I mean, I think this whole AI business is so fresh and so, so new and and that it's very difficult to judge here where it's going to end up. And, and, and I think there is, there is a lot of possibilities, but I mean it’s an also fundamentally dangerous process. Yeah, I'm, I'm in two minds about it. As an artist, obviously, I'm interested in in using it and I have used it already for my latest exhibition. There were a few terrestrial earthy images, which are actually then. And I used AI to to change the image. I mean, ultimately it is; it is just another technology, and it's. And and you're always the, you're always going to be the creator with AI because you tell AI what to do. And I think it's, it's still, I don't, I'm not an expert, and I don't know how far away it is, but AI at the moment doesn't tell AI what to do. I think then that's a whole new ball game.
But, but I find it again, you're coming back to the idea of photography. There is exactly the same questions now, you know, raised about AI. Oh, AI is not art. You're not the author. Well, they said exactly 100% identical things about photography or photography is no art because it's a mechanical process. It's really interesting. New technology comes, and immediately it's questioned whether, and there is traditionalists who say, oh, this is not what we are, what we know, and this is not what photography was. But then there is a new bunch of kids that jump on the new technology and run with it, and then eventually it gets accepted, and I think AI will be accepted just like any other tool within the. Within. Within, within the arts. And it's just a matter of time.
Amanda
And then, and then you'll be adding that to the history of photography. Yeah, I want to circle back to another project that you have worked on recently, which was your your plant, your seedling project because it seems to me so thematically different from the Mars work that I'm interested in. Hearing you talk A bit about your inspiration process and kind of the conceptual underpinnings of the work you did with the plants.
Joachim
Yeah, the plants are actually not that different. It's the same kind of thinking again it's, it's the the series is called Entangled and, and my whole basis of that series that, that all life, life on life forms on Earth are entangled. And we're actually going through this the very same things. And when you look at the little seedlings, and I have to say I, I did the project began by raising seedlings. I mean, in my garden, long before I pick up a camera, I looked at all about first. I started with commercial seeds you get at Bunnings or in a garden shop. And because they're very easy to come up, then I actually looked at branched out into native plants which are much more difficult to germinate. And I looked at weeds, etc. So, we all have an expectation of what a plant is. There’re good plants, there're bad plants, but a good plant here is a bad plant here is a good plant in Europe. And the other way around, you know, eucalyptus trees are destroying endless parts of Spain because they just dry out the soil. And so. But we live in a, we live on a planet where there is continental exchange now. I mean, and nothing is bound to its origin. It's all a big mess and everything is, is, is moving around. So, we have to face that. That was one thing that interested me. I, first of all, I just looked at all these different plants and the other thing is then actually when I started to, to, to, to grow them, the, the, the idea, the fundamental characteristic of a seedling is that most of the time you cannot tell what plant it is because.
And all of a sudden, all these seedlings look, looked similar at best, you know, so, so all these categorisations are just basically gone through the drain, you know, I mean, they, they use it because I don't know whether that is a good plant that's growing there. Is it a weed or not? You know, because I'm looking at the tiny, tiny seedling. So that was the next thing that fascinated me. But then, of course, there is this connection to photography because, because it's, it's the birth of a plant, and I'm using the oldest process, the birth of photography. And also, very interestingly, Henry Fox Talbot was also a very accomplished botanist, and he had a colleague, John Herschel, which also was a very established botanist. And they're constantly if you look at their letters and their correspondence, they constantly talk about a specimen and you never know whether they talk about a specimen of plant or a specimen of photograph because they send each other prints and, and botany, botanic species. So, it's really quite interesting. And the first part of the letter is about photography. The next part of the letter is about botany. And it was a very interesting serendipity which I got attracted to as well. And last but not least, another similarity is the idea of birth. When you look at these seedlings and how they, when you really check them every day and you check have they come up and, and, and you actually understand what an enormous power is behind this, this, this tiny, tiny thing that actually cracks the shell open and then digs this way up, actually puts roots down first and then digs his way up to the light.
And, and it's, it's of course very different to human birth but, but it's, it's this fundamental characteristic of life that it's so, so powerful and, and at the same time, vulnerable in the beginning. That's, that's something which, again, you know, a lot of life forms share. And, and so again it just came back to me that everything is entangled and hence eventually settled on the name. You know, the history of botany with the history of photography. A human birth, plant birth. We, we, you know, light, the, the seedlings react to light just like film. You know, actually, when I had my lights on and I thought it was photographing them, you could see how this more slowly move towards the light.
And yeah, whatever you look at, you just find it's. We're coming to the same same but different. And and I think that is some. And I'm coming back to my, my, to this idea of worlds that, that you know, they are all same, same but different. And and I think if we if we understand that we all connected as all connected as one on this one planet, then, then we understand that we that we that we can only survive together. And whether it's humans and humans and humans in nature and, and, and that we can't afford to kill off, you know, a, that are on the planet because it's going to come back to haunt us.
Amanda
Yeah. Well, Joachim, I have like so much more I wanted to ask you, but that feels like a really great place to sort of begin to wrap up. And thank you so much for joining us here today. It's been a pleasure to chat with you.
Joachim
Good. It was a pleasure.
Amanda
Science Write Now is sponsored by Creative Australia and donations from readers and listeners on Chuffed, Substack and the Australian Cultural Fund. This episode was hosted by Amanda Niehaus and produced by William Robertson.
Thanks so much for listening.