Creating with a multi-colored gum method

The multi-colored gum method is complicated, long-lasting, and laborious. Moreover, due to unpredictable final effects, it is a kind of mystery that you must discover step by step.

- JACEK WASKO

This is the significant difference that contrasts the technique of one hundred years ago with modern microprocessors and highly advanced technologies.

I have been living and working in London, but I was born in Poland in 1960. I am an art conservator, painter, and fine art photographer. I have been interested in photography since the 1980s. In those days, I learned about alternative photographic techniques, especially the so-called gum bichromate.

In the 1990s, I made the first tests in this technique without any special results, and without giving up, I returned to this topic 15 years ago.

Currently, I work in this technique, and I am still experimenting because gum bichromate is a unique photographic process; like no other technique, it allows interfering in the final creative process, which makes the final result very close to painting; The uniqueness of this technique lies in the combination of apparent simplicity (the sun itself is enough to illuminate the work and ordinary water to develop the photos). Then, with a complex process of selecting ingredients (gum arabic, potassium dichromate, and pigment in appropriate proportions), manual distribution of the photosensitive emulsion onto an adequately prepared substrate, and finally washing it out to give the work its final shape.

There is no official method of using gum in practice. A print made from the same negative is always somehow original and unique regardless of the number and order of copies because repeatability of physical activities and maintaining stability for a multitude of process parameters can never be guaranteed. Thus, each artist also becomes a discoverer, working out by himself the best ways to carry out these seemingly simple actions.