#9/16: Alternative Processes

21st Editions is now celebrating sixteen years of The Art of the Book! In this series of sixteen emails we are sharing with you a chronology of highlights, events, and stories from the beginning of our unique publishing endeavor up until now. We hope you enjoy them.

As John Wood admits “The leaps in computer technology since 1989 have been astounding, and their impact on photography has been the most revolutionary event in photography’s history.” John’s insistence on publishing Baldridge with pigment ink prints had to do with the fact that his art could not have been created any other way. So, in 2008, with Jamie Baldridge as our guide, 21st Editions published the first of two books that incorporated this new technology in, The Everywhere Chronicles.

 

Like other poets we have published, John Metoyer studied at McNeese State University under John Wood. His diverse range of interests and his ability to synthesize them into a work of art, whether a poem, photograph, painting, or sculpture, exemplifies this rare and unique find. John Metoyer is unique, not only because he is a very fine and accomplished conceptual artist and printer of many old processes, but he is equally as fine a poet. It is because of our great respect for this unique artist and poet that Blood Migration (2008) was selected to celebrate 21st Editions’ 10th Anniversary title.

An ancestor of John Metoyer’s migrated from France, married a slave, and through grants and purchases, she and her children amassed some 13,000 to 15,000 acres of land and became one of the richest African American families in the country. Yucca Plantation was the first and possibly the only plantation owned by a freed African. It is now a National Historic Landmark, noted not only for its classic plantation home but also for the African house, which is the oldest building in the U.S. of African design. Blood Migration, with a collection of autobiographical poems, is unlike any other book we will be able to create again in large part because of the nineteen 15×22-inch photographs that are hand coated and printed in platinum, palladium, kallitype, and cyanotype.