Skinnerboox: All about Chroma, by John Divola

During the months of June and July, you can enjoy on Leporello’s walls John Divola’s last book printing proofs. Not exactly an exhibition, but a great way to linger over one of the key moments in the process of a book making:the reference prints used to get the best tones and colors in the printing press. On June 10th, the first day of the prints’ set up in Leporello, Milo Montelli from Skinnerboox takes over our instagram account to tell us a bit more about the book’s making of.

From David Campany’s interview with John Divola published in Chroma:

“Immediately after Zuma I made some rather straightforward photographs of the abandoned MGM Studios New York City back lot, in Culver City, Los Angeles. These were in black and white.  I then decided to try something entirely different and around 1980 I started a body of work about things you can’t photograph: Gravity, Magnetism, which way water drains, and the things I see when I press my eyes with the palms of my hands. All of these images required the construction of some kind of visual metaphor.  One diptych was about temperature.  There were two images, one with a fan blowing over a block of ice, which should be cool, and another with an electric heater with a block of ice, which would be neutral.  So, for those images I decided to use colored gels.  The fan and ice used a blue gel to represent cool while the electric heater and ice was magenta (which is red and blue) since it was both warm and cold.
At the same time, I was switching from color negative that I was using for Zuma to large format color transparency.  I had become aware that the early C-type color prints faded badly and was trying to use a new, more stable material. This was Cibachrome, which printed from transparencies. It was very industrial and artificial, with deep color saturation and contrast. It was a very flawed material for conventional images but with unique properties that I ended up embracing for the Chroma images.“