Welcome to John J. Penner whose fine art landscape photography is the first collection of photographic artwork to be represented on Grasslands Gallery Online. It’s a pleasure!
John J. Penner’s photography practice extends from film to digital to alternative and historic processes, leading him to expand his technical expertise and open new paths of artistic exploration. In this series he has used salt printing, an intensively hand crafted process invented in the 1840s by William Henry Fox Talbot as the first reproducible process to yield an image on paper.
To make a salt print, watercolour paper is coated with a solution of Kosher salt and household gelatin, then dried and sensitized so when it is exposed to ultraviolet light through a contact negative, the area receiving light darkens and becomes insoluble, yielding an image. It is then processed through a salt solution developer, fixed, and washed to remove any chemical traces remaining in the paper.
John talks about his decision to work the way he does. “In a digital age, photographic images are ubiquitous and consumed voraciously, then discarded without much thought. Producing handcrafted photographic prints slows down this process and allows for a more contemplative approach to visualization. The process yields not simply an image, but an artifact, which has sensual properties much like a painting, sculpture, or a tapestry, while the monochromatic prints afford a level of abstraction that encourages contemplative observation.”
John’s reverence for nature’s subtleties is on view in the photographic work he has exhibited over the last several years, both nationally and internationally.
Grasslands Gallery Online is proud to welcome John J. Penner to our family of distinguished artists making beautiful things. You can see more of his artwork here.