“I looked up Vertigo and I realised how there were so many different themes running through the work that you wouldn’t be aware of unless you studied cinema. She eventually came to Alfred Hitchcock’s films. I did some research and realised no-one had ever done this before.” “I immediately thought about how I could take a frame from an early technicolour film and make a print of it. When Curran started researching the dye-transfer process, she discovered it was how many early colour films were made. I’ve become as self-sufficient as possible.” That is what brought me to London - I knew there was somebody there who had some materials so I went over and figured it out.
But I decided come hell or high water I would figure it out. “There are only four or five of us still operating in the world - and most of the materials are obsolete. There were many challenges in taking up a process that was in significant decline but Curran was unperturbed. The end result formed the exhibition From Both Sides now, which led to Curran pursuing dye-transfer printing. I took the pictures in Kabul, flew to Dubai, went into a darkroom, processed the film myself, made my black-and-white print and then flew back to Afghanistan where I got a local portrait photographer who would have hand-coloured photos before there was colour film to come out of retirement and hand-paint these pictures for me.” “I went down a rabbit hole in my mind… thinking about how could I open up the photographic print, have more of a presence within the creation of it. I kept on thinking that I wanted to have the experience I had in the darkroom in St John’s.”Ĭurran’s epiphany came when she was completing a project photographing soldiers in Afghanistan. “Even when I was doing that, I was interested in finding different ways of printing. All the time, I was thinking that ultimately, I wanted my work on a wall in a gallery.”Ĭurran returned to Ireland, doing a masters in fine art photography at the University of Ulster in Belfast. “I moved out to Kenya in 2010 because I really wanted to break into international news but when I got out there and I saw the life of a photojournalist, living out of a suitcase and staying in the worst accommodation possible, I decided it was not what I wanted. “I did the bingo calls in Killeagh, following the Lord Mayor around, all of that,” she laughs.įollowing a ten-year stint in Dublin working in national news, Curran took her camera further afield. Getting that basis in photography has stood to me through everything I have done.”Ĭurran went on to work for a small photographic news agency in Cork, which gave her the grounding to pursue a career in photojournalism. There are very few colleges in the world that you can print your own work in both black-and-white and colour. “Being able to use the darkroom, I knew I had found my thing. When she left school, she did some travelling and on her return, enrolled in the photography diploma in St John’s College in Cork, a decision that changed the course of her life. However, it was in Cork that the seeds were sown for her work as a photographic artist. One of the images from The Vertigo Project by Jean Curran.Ĭurran, who grew up near Kilmacthomas in Co Waterford, came to the craft via a career in photo-journalism, working in Dublin, London, Kenya, Afghanistan and Dubai.
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The exhibition features a series of selected frames from an original Technicolor print of the 1958 Hitchcock classic, which are then printed using the same dye transfer process by which the movie was made. Her most recent work, The Vertigo Project, is currently showing at the prestigious Danziger Gallery in New York where it is creating a real buzz among art and photography aficionados alike. It sounds simple but it takes about a week to do one print.” Often in my prints, a lot of it I will have painted in myself or increased the density or vibrancy of a colour by doing it myself by hand.
That is the part I love, that engagement and coming between the layers of the photograph, doing it by hand and making it as close to painting as possible. “When I make the second print, I am able to come in by hand with my paintbrushes or different chemistry and either take away or add things.
Photographic artist Jean Curran is firmly in the ranks of those creative hold-outs, one of only a handful of people in the world who practises the specialised and time-consuming art of dye-transfer printing.Īfter a traditional darkroom process, Curran takes the prints and applies paint or different chemical methods to achieve the final result.
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