For a little while now, I’ve been interested in the idea of creating an edition that would somehow speak about the history of photography, and its ongoing relevance to the digital, so it seemed beautifully serendipitous when I stumbled across Max Caffell and 31 Studio, who inhabit some part of the intersection between those two things.

Max, and his father Paul before him, have been creating platinum prints from their studio in Stroud for some of the most interesting names in modern and contemporary photography, including David Bailey, Don McCullin, Simon Starling, and Sebastião Salgado, amongst many others. I don’t know when I first became aware of platinum printmaking, many years ago now I think, perhaps during a formative visit to the Fox Talbot Museum in Laycock in the eighties. It’s been a medium that has always interested me, largely for the softened beauty and delicate tonal range of the finished prints, as well as the extraordinarily glamourous history of the medium.

Hope this finds you well. I've been enjoying myself working up the artwork for the latest Club edition, #17, attached here. The working title is Vox linea / EPC #17 / platinum edition. I've had the idea for this monochrome drawing in the back of my mind for a couple of years now, it's one of those things that I was ultra confident would work out well, when once I actually got around to sitting down and working it all out. In many ways, I'm happier with it than I had expected to be, which is good! The piece is about the space contained within the picture plane, and the way the forms bisect, interlock, and speak to each other.