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"Weird can be awfully beautiful when captured in photographs and solar etchings that show the ordinarily mundane up close and a little fuzzy."
From a review of my prints in The Santa Fe Reporter, May 2006

Solar etching is a modern version of an alternative photographic printing process called photogravure, developed more than one hundred years ago.  The process exploits the light-sensitive property of a treated surface to reproduce an image. I want my work to present what the light illuminates and also to demonstrate light's transformative power—the actual physical and chemical process it can trigger. 

I begin with a digital camera to capture light in the form of an image on a microelectronic sensor. This image is modified in a computer and then printed onto a transparent film using an inkjet printer. The film is then laid onto a photosensitive polymer-coated metal plate and exposed to the raw Santa Fe sunlight.  The UV rays passing through the clear areas of the film react with the polymer and harden it. The image is “developed” by gently brushing the surface in water to remove the unreacted polymer. The plate is then dried and "fixed" with more sunlight to creat the printing plate. The surface of this plate has minute indentations or "etch marks" that reproduce the original image. Ink is spread on the plate to fill these "pits" and then transferred to wet paper by passing the plate and paper through an etching press under high pressure. Thus, pictures of sunlight, made by the sunlight.
  
Copyright, Andrew Neighbour © 2008
All images are copyrighted and may not be reproduced or used without the express written permission of the artist
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