Photo de Dominique Rodride

The title — Photograph of Dominique Rodride — indicates a print derived from or referencing a photographic source image of the artist. Translating a photograph into mokuhanga is a deliberate act of mediation: the continuous tone of the photograph must be resolved into discrete carved blocks, with each tonal value or color requiring its own block registered to kento marks. The result is necessarily an interpretation rather than a reproduction, and the gap between photographic source and woodblock output is often where the artistic decisions of such a print reside. Contemporary mokuhanga practitioners routinely work from photographic references in this way, using the medium to slow and material-ize an image that originated as a near-instantaneous capture. The piece also operates as a self-presentational work — an artist depicting herself via the indirection of a photograph translated through carved wood and water-based pigment. Within Rodride's output, it pairs with the self-titled print as a second mode of self-representation, framed by the medium's distinctive procedures.