Marina Berio’s Family Matter and Gum Bichromate Printing
by Mason Kelly
April 2, 2025
by Mason Kelly
April 2, 2025
Berio, Marina. “family matter 5.” 2008/2013. gum bichromate print with blood.
https://www.marinaberio.net/family-matter.
Marina Berio’s photographic project Family Matter is a series of seventeen intimate portraits of her own family. The images show her son and his father playing, fighting, and roughhousing, devoid of any identifiable background, isolated entirely in the frame. It’s an exploration of their relationship, as well as father-son relationships as a whole. The series sees a progression from more playful wrestling to real anger, play-fighting until one of them inevitably gets hurt. There’s a disconnect, however, between this common father-son relationship and Marina herself. This routine is largely foreign to her, positioning her as both observer and outsider. Yet the process she uses to create the images makes her present in the scene, binding herself to the images in which she doesn’t visibly appear.
These painterly photographs were created using gum bichromate printing, a 19th-century photographic process pioneered by Mungo Ponton, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Alphonse Poitevin. Instead of the traditional usage of silver-based chemistry that analog photography processes typically rely on, gum bichromate printing utilizes a mixture of gum arabic, a dichromate salt (typically potassium or ammonium dichromate), and any sort of pigment. The final prints are made by mixing the gum arabic with the dichromate salt and the pigment of your choice, which is then painted onto paper and left to dry. A negative is then placed on top of the coated surface and exposed under UV light, causing the dichromate to harden the gum, binding the pigment to the paper. The print is then developed in water, which washes away the unhardened areas to form the image. This process allows for significant artistic control, such as layering multiple exposures, which, if done with multiple layers of pigments painted on top of one another, can create a full color print. You can also alter the brushstrokes in which you apply the pigment, which could result in denser tones in certain areas, more texture, streaks, or gradients. Also, perhaps the most exciting modification that this process allows for is the usage of alternate pigments.
Marina binds herself to these photographs of her family by using her own blood as the pigment. It creates a very monochromatic look, which strips away distraction, focusing the viewer’s attention on the connection between father and son and the familial bond that exists. Though she’s not an active participant in the wrestling and play-fighting depicted in the images, she is by nature “bound to these males and implicated in their routine,” communicated by her own blood as the pigment of the images (Berio). She exists in the images, though she doesn’t appear.