THE BEST OF THE BEST

The Best of the Best records champion animals at the 2018 Minnesota State Fair, one of the most competitive animal contests in the world. Animal breeding, like photography, is an arena of technical and material evolution. This series explores the relationship between the present and the past, drawing parallels between early animal contests at agricultural fairs and the first major exhibition of photography at the 1851 World’s Fair in London.

In this project, I document an event in which 12 pairs of animal species are judged supreme champion— the best of the best. Using a digital camera, I photographed winning exemplars of domesticated animals then combined 19th-century salt printing techniques and contemporary inkjet technology into images that emphasize changes in breeds over time and advances in photographic technology. It is science and art; it renders both an objective typology of animal husbandry and commentary on animal contests at this time and place. The hand-crafted portraits reference similarities between the history and development of photography and the advent of animal contests.

As with life, animal breeding, and photography, the contributions of chance remind us that we are not in control. Two champions do not guarantee champion offspring. The unforeseen result of science and chance can be the embodiment of beauty or success. When several animals meet and exceed the standards that judges rely on to guide their decisions, the winner becomes a subjective choice.

The color red is a unifying element and a nod to French photographer Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, 1820–1910), who used the color in marketing his work. Historically, the color red has represented life, health, and victory. It also symbolizes a shared characteristic between the animals: the color of blood, whose principal ingredient is salt— an essential element for mammals and birds.

Salt prints, a photographic process popular between 1839-1860, connect to photography’s historical roots; printing on them digitally connects to the present. Combining these two printing processes softens photography’s particularized quality. The subtle tones of salt printing express mood and emotion, a contrast to the sharpness of a digital print. Subject, process, emotion, science, and chance combine to make both an immediate document and a comment on photography’s past, present, and future.

R. J. Kern
Minneapolis, Minnesota

August 8, 2019

SALT OF THE EARTH: R. J. KERN’S THE BEST OF THE BEST

Do animals have a claim on history? Is culture expressed in the shape of a beak, girth of an udder or the slope of a snout? With their abbreviated lifespans, do they carry cultural memory in their feathers, fur, and hides? These are the questions R. J. Kern poses in The Best of the Best. With twelve pairs of animals—one female, one male—Kern intertwines the history of animal competitions with the history of photography to explore some of humanity’s most urgent questions about its relationship to its fellow earthly creatures and their interwoven fates. Kern’s intricate prints, which layer salt prints over digital prints, foreground historical inquiry, human intervention, and nature’s persistence.

Two by two, these specimens are presented, these animals that compose the Supreme Champion Breeding Gilt. Would Noah concur, one wonders. The judges at the Minnesota State Fair who inspected every inch of their bodies certainly approved, finding strengths and qualities only visible to the trained eye. Large and small, these animals—cattle, chickens, dogs, ducks, geese, goats, horses, llamas, rabbits, sheep, swine, and turkeys—pose for the camera before a simple backdrop, away from the hum of fair attendees, vendors hawking their wares, and the large-scale barns housing their vanquished competitors. Though subjective, their status of superiority is a part of history, too, stretching back to the 1850s, when local and international trade fairs became popular. Not coincidentally, Kern has chosen the salt print which also found its greatest popularity in the 1850s as French innovators tinkered with Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot’s invention of a positive/negative photographic process. Kern finds inspiration in one of the greatest practitioners of the salt print: Nadar, a one-named auteur with celebrity connections who had a flair for using a vivid red in his advertisements, as Kern does in homage across The Best of the Best prints.

Valued for their contradictory clarity and diffuseness, salt prints imbed themselves into the paper fibers whose unique patterning lend an element of chance to the process even as the precise chemistry and mechanical reproduction would seem to offer irrefutable visual fact. Kern unevenly applies the salt solution in places to give the final image an incompleteness, as though it is being transmitted from a historical distance. This uneven application makes it clear that photography is still an all too human process, dependent upon the artist for its existence and its specificity. Humanity’s mark on paper through Kern’s artistry and its formation of animals through husbandry come together especially keenly in Boer Goats where the fractured figures of handlers hold the animals’ leads upright. Notoriously stubborn, goats necessarily need the strongest intervention to pose for the artist’s camera (and perhaps keep them from eating the backdrop). Yet it is not only their pose that is influenced by their keepers, but also every fiber of their beings: their height, muscle tone, and weight through feeding and care; and their softly sloped snouts, distinctive brown and white color patterns, fat distribution, and production capacity culled through selective breeding. In short, the very blood that courses through their pronounced veins has been directed by these hands. Kern echoes the sanguine in the red bands and squares of inkjet print that burst through the sepia salt print, bringing the vivid life force of each animal to the fore in full color.

Kern is party to a growing inquiry into the bloodlines of photography—what do its origins impart to today’s artists and audiences? The sepia and cyan of the earliest paper-based processes have seeped into today’s cultural consciousness not least through the one-touch filters of Instagram but also in the work of his artistic contemporaries, many of whom have turned to the expressive potential of expired photographic papers, the direct indexical relationship of photograms, and the melancholic cast of albumen prints to compel history into the present. In an era of increased extreme weather events, disappearing glaciers, and subsumed peninsulas, Kern turns our attention to the related and vital topic of husbandry. How we treat and breed our animals is intimately tied to how we treat our land and the earth as a whole. The fraught roots of the industrial food complex can be found in these traditions of breeding the largest and hardiest specimens. Whereas industry hides, however, these specimens are made for praise and display. These selected animals, these supreme champions—the best of the best—express human history as much as their own unique breed characteristics. In the size of a supreme champion cow’s udders, we see the basic human desire for nourishment for as many people as possible from as few resources as possible. Humanity’s imprints on animal breeds express human preferences and needs as well as their greatest aspirations. Kern weaves these together through the warp and weft of sepia and scarlet, matte and glossy, salt and blood paying tribute to the histories of photography and animal competitions while laying a path for the evolution of the one and the preservation of the other.

Anjuli J. Lebowitz

Department of Photographs

National Gallery of Art

Washington, DC, USA

AN ANALYSIS OF SALT-OVER-PIGMENT PRINTING ON MICROPOROUS PAPER

The processes used by R. J. Kern in The Best of the Best combines a salt printing process with inkjet technology resulting in an original approach to photography as unique as the animal subjects. Salt printing is a photographic process using silver nitrate and a salt solution to create light-sensitive paper. The pigment (inkjet) print is aqueous and uses subtractive color theory to resulting in specific wavelengths reflecting to our eyes.

Kern’s images are a marriage of both printing processes which share a coating layer typically used only for aqueous inkjet inks.Microporous coatings are made up of three basic constituents— silica, a binder, and a water-absorbing polymer; they absorb the chemical composition of the inkjet ink anchoring the colorant on matte paper. The microporous coating components are often unique in their chemical composition per substrate (paper) manufacturer. The formulation is key to the integration of salt printing and pigment inks on the same substrate.

Aqueous pigment ink is composed of three ingredients— a vehicle, a colorant, and additives. The vehicle is the element that carries the colorant (pigment) to the substrate; it is composed of water, glycol, isopropanol, and proprietary chemicals to each manufacturer.

The presence of silica absorbs water and colorant creating an area where the pigment and sensitized salt chemistry will settle; both will also settle in the spaces between the silica particles. In a matte microporous coating, the silica particles average 6 microns in size as compared to photographic nanoporous (luster) coatings that utilize dispersed illumina (a chemical compound) pigment, which typically averages 0.8 microns in size. The particle size of the matte microporous coating allows the larger salt printing chemicals to absorb into the silica and gaps between silica particles. The binder is crucial because it enables the matte microporous coating to stay adhered while the substrate is submerged during the salt printing process. Both silica and binder create a surface layer where pigmented ink and the salt solution will rest near the surface, but not be completely absorbed into the substrate, as seen in Figures 1 - 4. Where applied alone in Figures 1 and 2, the salt printing chemistry occupies the inkjet layer. In Kern’s technique, both salt solution and pigment mix in the same microporous layer, but are not absorbed into the substrate itself. In Figures 3 and 4, the inkjet layer is printed first and occupies the bottom portion of the microporous coating, and the salt printing sits on top of the inkjet pigment within the microporous coating. The use of these contrasting technologies creates a unique methodology which compliments Kern’s conceptually-driven aesthetic.

A cross-section of one of Kern’s photographs was imaged with a microscope at a magnification of 200 times life-size. The goal of this analysis is to better understand how salt printing techniques interact with contemporary pigment printing. The transmitted light analysis reveals greater paper characteristics, where as the reflected light analysis reveals greater printing characteristics. These figures are a cross-sectional visualization of the microporous coating containing salt printing and the combination of salt printing and pigment ink when used on Hahnemühle Photo Rag (308 gsm) paper

Eric T. Kunsman
Visual Communications Studies

Rochester Institute of Technology

Rochester, NY, USA

COLOPHON

The COLLECTOR’S EDITION of The Best of the Best by R. J. Kern represents the artist’s third book project which engages a range of artisans and essayists. This project debuted in a solo exhibition at Burnet Fine Art & Advisory in Wayzata, Minnesota, August 8 - 31, 2019.

The project coincides with the commemorative artwork commissioned for the 2019 Minnesota State Fair. This artist book— illustrated with a classic photographic processing including both hand-coated salt prints and contemporary salt prints over archival pigment prints—marks and celebrates this milestone.

Each COLLECTOR’S EDITION contains a 15-page accordion-fold visual book and print folio. From its 11 x 14 x 3 inch box, the accordion-fold book unfolds into a sequence of photographs and three-dimensional pop-ups. The book includes twelve bound salt prints along with four pop-up salt prints with salt print backgrounds. The book may be opened from either direction and displayed upright in an array of presentation shapes to include a rectangle (similar to barn stalls), a star, or a line. If exhibited in a rectangle form, dimensions are 41.25 x 31 inches. The print folio includes one freestanding salt-over- archival pigment print signed by R. J. Kern; each of these prints is a unique animal pair drawn from an edition of 10.

The salt prints were printed and gold-toned by the artist on Fabriano Bristol+ (250 gsm) paper, waxed with white beeswax and lavender oil. The pop-up elements were constructed and hand-cut by Kyle Olmon with the application of a pH-neutral archival polyvinyl acetate (PVA) glue. Keith Taylor created the book binding, book cradle, and print folio. Each of the pages was made with book board, bound using archival materials and processes. The Dragon EF font by Elsner + Flake was used in the embossing and text. The red canvas backdrop used in the photographic project was painted by Sarah Oliphant using acrylic on canvas prepared with gesso. A cut segment from this canvas appears in the book cradle of the wooden box. Jeff Berg built the walnut and maple spline presentation box and prepared the UV-protecting acrylic glazing with pull tab. The archival pigment prints were printed by Ethan Aaro Jones on Hahnemühle Photo Rag (308 gsm) paper. The salt prints and the salt-over-archival pigment prints were printed by R. J. Kern in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The Best of the Best is an edition of eighteen copies; twelve copies numbered 1-12; two copies noted AP1 and AP2 for the artist; three contributors’ copies lettered A, B, C; and one hors commerce copy—each signed by the artist and contributors.