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](/glossary/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.