A FORCE OF NATURE [back]
HERBARIUM - BLUE PRINTS
A FORCE OF NATURE - THE EARLY WORKS OF JULIO DE MATOS
It was over twenty-five years ago that Julio de Matos was a member of a class that I taught at Rochester Institute of Technology. During that time, he produced the images that have formed the basis of this elegant book, Herbarium: Blue Prints, 1980. The fact that I can still picture some of these images in my mind's eye after so much time has passed, attests to their staying power and their ability to fascinate. With over thirty-five years of teaching, I have worked with many students. I clearly remember Julio's positive energy and the excitement that this work generated. At the time, I was teaching the traditional processes of cyanotype, VanDyke Brown printing and gum-bichromate printing to the students in an elective course that Júlio de Matos took. We probably talked about the use of photograms and other ways of creating negatives in order to utilize these processes. I often gave an assignment that I called Direct Images, which encouraged students to bypass the traditional darkroom and work with these antiquarian emulsions in a painterly fashion. Julio came up with the idea to experiment with Diazo paper, a product that he was familiar with from his prior education. It was a commercially available version of the blue print material familiar to architects. It was inexpensive, and needed to be developed in concentrated ammonia fumes. He knew far more about it than I did. In fact, he taught me something new, which is one of the real rewards of my profession. After he brought in the first of these images, we both were hooked. He had come up with an innovative method of putting plant material in direct contact with the Diazo paper on the bed of an etching press. The force of the press caused the juices in the plants to transfer to the paper with unpredictable effects, colors and textures. In 1980, the Rochester Institute of Technology campus had a small Japanese garden outside of the photography building and some freshly planted trees. If one was willing to walk, the campus was surrounded by open land. Many of the plants used for this work appear to be common wildflowers such as goldenrod and thistle, and leaves from maple and evergreen trees. I suspect that some of these plants were new to Julio and not found in his native Portugal. This technique enabled him to directly document his new surroundings. The idea to directly contact plants onto light sensitive materials is a very simple one, and one of the oldest. Indeed the first photographic books in the history of the medium were produced by this process. A British woman, Anna Atkins, produced her series Photographs of British Algae between 1843-1853, by contact printing her specimens directly onto paper coated with the newly discovered cyanotype solution. She learned about the process through her father's friendship with the inventor of cyanotype, Sir John Herschel. Her impressive body of work was intended as a scientific study, but today is appreciated for its beauty as art. Although Júlio de Matos' images fall directly in the tradition of contact prints with plants, they are anything but static. This is what makes them so appealing. They explode. They refuse to stay still. They make the viewer aware of the life forces in the plants themselves, through the evidence of sap, smell and moisture. The resultant stains were unpredictable and beautiful in their color and placement. Through this activity, a rather flat and boring commercial material was transformed and used for an entirely unexpected purpose. This transformative effect is indeed the role art can play in our lives. It is what made the work exciting then as it remains now.
Bea Nettles, Photographer, Educator, 2006
(Introduction for the book: “Herbarium: Blue Prints, 1980”)