Domenico Foschi - Fine Art Photography

These are Black and white toned silver prints going trough a bleach stage. I have produced this work as monoprints meaning that none of the images generating from the same negative will ever look the same because of the nature of the last stage of manipulation they go through. The image, generated by a 4 x 5 inch negative is printed by traditional wet darkroom process, then sepia toned in the highlights, selenium toned in middletones and shadows. The last stage is what gives the texturelike effect achieved by brushing potassium ferricyanide on the print sometime masked in some areas with art masking fluid where I don’t want the effect of the bleach at all or only minimally. The technique requires a trial and error stage to understand how the bleach works in different areas of the image and adjustments in dilutions and time and other variables need to be made in order to master such a seemingly hard to control process. I will not get into details, but once you understand the action of the “ferri” on a toned print it is a rewarding process, because it can give you striking effects.

Domenico Foschi was born in Bari , Italy , in 1962 .Although always exploring different kinds of creative media since childhood, he found that photography would be what he would stick with for many years to come, after stealing his brother¹s camera for a short trip . He was nineteen at the time. Not being able to afford a formal education in photography, he started to study the work of the masters in books . He found the expressive power of the work of Alvin Langdon Coburn , Kertesz , Steichen , Stieglitz , Strand , Sander , Penn . Avedon , Mapplethorpe and a few others , of pivotal importance to his direction as a Fine Art photographer. Working in the Sergio Guidetti Studio Fotografico, he received hands on training from wet plate processes , to the use of large format cameras , to developing and printing techniques .He then worked as a freelance commercial photographer in Ravenna, his home-town, shooting primarily for magazines , newspapers , the City Administration and political parties . Soon he realized that commercial photography wasn¹t going to allow him to explore his creativity in a more personal way .D, F. moved in the U. S. in 1989. Here he has produced six different portfolios.ranging from portraits , to Urban Landscapes , to Still Life to images of cemeteries statuaries . His commercial work took a direction on his own, mainly by producing CD covers for recording artists .D. F. has won awards and honorable mentions for his Fine Art work and his images are in collections throughout the U, S.as well Europe and Latin America .