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Eavesdropping – with Jane Wildgoose 

Cyanotype portraits and video, 2021


Eavesdropping explores the potential of the cyanotype process to create multiple impressions from one image. During 2020, I contact-printed twenty-five unique cyanotype prints using the same negative of a portrait of artist Jane Wildgoose. As part of my  experiments, some of the prints were toned with tea and coffee, creating sepia-like prints. The image used was from a shoot I did some years previously when I photographed Jane Wildgoose at The Wildgoose Memorial Library in London.

A short film explores the animating qualities of the prints when placed in a timeline; the images slowly merging with a video portrait of the same scene.

Words, written and read by Jane Wildgoose and recorded during a talk, accompany the film. The text taken out of context becomes a comment on the dynamic relationship between muse and photographer, subject and viewer, of watching and being watched. 

I was delighted when at the close of 2020, Rebecca Duclos, Professor of Art History at Concordia University in Montreal commissioned me to produce video footage of The Wildgoose Memorial Library, working with the reduced daylight available at that time of year. Collaborating with Jane Wildgoose, I created a video archive of the Library before it was to be dismantled for renovation and redecoration.


Cyanotype portraits and video of Jane Wildgoose by Roelof Bakker. Text from a live reading by Jane Wildgoose from her essay ‘A Visit to the Archives’ in Strong Room (Roelof Bakker & Jane Wildgoose, Negative Press London, 2014). www.janewildgoose.co.uk www.rbakker.com/Strong-Room



Cyanotype portraits on Arches Platine, 310gsm, 8.3cm x11cm
 
High definition video, colour, sound, 1:37 min, 2021 

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Roelof Bakker, all rights reserved, 2024