hƯƠng Trịnh

Hello, I’m hƯƠng Trịnh, a writer, editor, and designer. My mother and I immigrated from Phan Thiet, Vietnam in the 1990s and settled in New Orleans, Louisiana.

I graduated from Queens University of Charlotte in 2016 with a BA in English Literature and Arts Leadership & Administration. At Queens, I joined the staff of Signet, the undergraduate-level lit mag. I’ve loved the written word for as long as I can remember, but it was here that I fell in love with design. I spent a total of three years on the staff of the literary magazine, working my way up from design editor to junior and then senior editor. Upon graduation, I was offered a permanent position with Qu, the graduate-level lit mag at Queens. At this time, I also started as a technical writer in earnest, first at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art and moving on from there. Over the course of the past several years, I’ve worked for a variety of cultural institutions, writing, editing, and designing. A few examples of that work can be viewed here.

These days, I’m interested in exploring the gray area between fine art and mass produced media. I’m a firm believer that something produced for the masses can also be a thing of beauty; technical writing doesn’t have to be boring. The only limitations are the ones we impose ourselves, and I would love to be a part of a creative, innovative, forward-thinking team.

Writing

Design

Summing it up

In 45 DRAWINGS, the portfolio Giacometti created in 1963, “we see an artist reckoning with his mortality [...] and the inevitable process of letting go, a beautiful and poignant love letter to the creative process.” To create the prints in the portfolio, Giacometti used a process called photogravure.

photogravure—a photomechanical process of etching into copper plates using aquatint, or powdered rosin—that had been popular amongst fine art photographers and some illustrators for decades had more or less died out by the 1940s.

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The earliest forms of photogravure were developed by Nicéphore Niépce (in France) and Henry Fox Talbot (in England), both pioneers of photography. In the1820s, Niépce was hoping to discover a process that could create photographic images on plates that could be etched and then used to make prints. Niépce is now credited with producing some of the first photographs, pre-dating the first daguerreotypes produced by Louis-Jaques-Mandé Daguerre around 1939. Later, in the 1950s, Talbot, who had created the calotype (also sometimes called talbotype) in 1841, was looking for a way to keep his prints from fading. He succeeded. In 1952, he patented a photomechanical process called photographic engraving, and in 1958, he patented another one called photoglyphic engraving.

In 1879, Karel Klíč refined and improved the photogravure process. Klíč was admitted into the Art Academy in Prague at 14, and eventually graduated in 1862 (after a brief expulsion for ridiculing school officials). After school, he worked as a photographer, caricaturist, and illustrator, and experimented with different methods of reproducing images. In 1879, he succeeded, creating a superior photogravure process that is still in use today.

The process, called the Talbot-Klíč process, begins with photo positive film printed on a transparent base and carbon tissue. The sheet of carbon tissue, or gelatin-coated paper, is cut to size. The carbon tissue is sensitized in potassium dichromate, then removed and dried against a flat surface. Once the carbon tissue has dried, it is peeled off of the flat surface, and placed aside to set. While it sets, the copper plate is prepared. It is cleaned and polished, and then dusted with an even layer of aquatint. The aquatint, or rosin dust, is then melted onto the plate. By then, the carbon tissue has finished setting. It is then exposed, in a vacuum, to ultraviolet light with the photo positive film in contact with it. This hardens some of the gelatin on the paper. The carbon tissue is then dampened and adhered to the copper plate. Once the carbon paper is dried, the entire copper plate is soaked in a hot water bath and the carbon paper is slowly peeled off as the gelatin melts. The gelatin that was not exposed by the ultraviolet light is washed away.

This leaves behind a gelatin stencil in negative of the photo positive image. The copper plate is then left to dry overnight. The next day, the edges of the copper are stopped out with an acid resist of some type, and several acid baths (made of ferric chloride) would be prepared. The acid eats through the thinner layers of gelatin first, then the thicker ones, as the copper plate is moved from bath to bath, creating indentations for the ink later on. Once the plate has been fully etched, the excess gelatin is washed off, the remaining aquatint is washed off with a solvent, and the copper plate is trimmed to size. Then, the edges of the plate are beveled to prevent it from damaging the paper used in the actual printing. Etching ink is spread onto the plate, and the excess is wiped off. Then, a dampened sheet of paper is placed atop the plate and the whole thing is run through a press.

although this was the prevalent form of the process from 1879 onwards, there isno guarantee that Giacometti used the Talbot-Klíč process for his photogravureprints.