Aleksander Mitka. Gum as Photography, Graphic Art, and Autonomous Image

Gum as Photography, Graphic Art, and Autonomous Image

Aleksander Mitka occupies a distinctive place in the history of alternative photography in Poland. Gum bichromate is not merely a historical process in his practice, nor is it a means of giving photographs a “painterly” appearance. It is a tool for constructing images in which photography, graphic art, painting, drawing, and conservation experience converge.[1]

Photography, however, came first. Mitka traces his beginnings in photography to 1958, when, as a young man, he encountered the medium in his father’s darkroom. He recalls the smell of photographic chemicals and film, the red light, and the enlarger, which he describes as a “large-format camera on a painter’s easel.”[1] This is more than a biographical memory. It offers an unusually precise image of the foundation of his later practice: photography appears here not simply as an image, but as a material process involving tools, substances, and the physical construction of a surface.

The breadth of this experience is one of the defining characteristics of Mitka’s practice. Gum bichromate is not confined to one particular type of image. It becomes an open method of constructing an image. Although it remains a photographic process, it can operate within the field of graphic art, and its matrix does not necessarily have to be photographic.

This duality leads to one of the central questions raised by Mitka’s work: how can a photographic process produce an image that functions as graphic art, while its source may be a photograph, a drawing, a painting, or another form of visual matrix?

Gum as Photographic Printmaking

Mitka dates the beginning of his work with gum bichromate to 1985.[1] His early works were made from negatives prepared on bromide photographic paper, with the final image constructed through several superimposed layers of different colours.[1]

The significance of these early experiments lies not simply in their technique, but in the way Mitka understood what the technique made possible. The successive application of pigment layers, together with control over colour and transparency, allowed the image to be constructed rather than merely reproduced.

As he puts it, he understood from the beginning that:

“GUM was a form of photoprinting and would allow me to work in the field of graphic art.”[1]

This statement is crucial to understanding his later practice. The graphic potential of gum was not, according to his account, something he discovered only after mastering the process as photography. It was present in his conception of the technique from the outset.

Gum was simultaneously a light-sensitive photographic process and a means of producing a material print.

The structure of the process itself supports this understanding. A layer containing a colloid, pigment, and dichromate is selectively hardened by exposure to light; after washing, the pigment remains to form the image. The process can then be repeated, allowing further layers to be added and their colour, density, and tonal character modified.[2]

Historically, this capacity for repeated construction already placed gum close to graphic art and painting. In Mitka’s practice, however, this potential is developed with particular consistency.

Photography and Graphic Art

Mitka describes gum unequivocally as a photographic technique, while at the same time emphasizing its acceptance within the field of graphic art.[1]

There is no need to choose between these two classifications.

The photographic character of gum derives from the action of light upon a photosensitive layer. Its graphic character emerges from the way the image is constructed: through pigment, successive layers, work with a matrix, and the possibility of producing an edition.

In Mitka’s practice, these two dimensions do not compete. Gum is photography capable of functioning as graphic art.

This dual position can also be traced in the ways his work has been described institutionally. In materials relating to the 2004 exhibition Szlachetna fotografia (Noble Photography), his work was still situated primarily within photography using historic and noble processes.[3] A decade later, ZPAF materials accompanying the exhibition Gumografie described his works as “painterly transpositions” and situated gum within the relationship between his photographic, painterly, and drawing practices.[4]

This does not necessarily indicate a fundamental change in the nature of his work. It may instead indicate a shift in the language through which that work was interpreted and positioned within the artistic field.

The “Friezes” and Painterly Transposition

The Friezes provide a particularly revealing example. Mitka’s catalogued works include:

• Blind Men’s Procession after Bruegel – Frieze No. 1, 2001,

• Gulliver’s Travels – Frieze No. 2, 2001,

• Frieze No. 12 – Proscenium, 2002,

• Portrait of Sophie – Frieze No. 13, 2003.

These works are catalogued as gum bichromates, often built up in multiple layers.[5]

Their titles already suggest that the starting point may lie outside photography: in literature, historical art, theatre, or a compositional structure. Gum then becomes a means of translating an image from one medium into another.

For this reason, the term “painterly transposition,” used by ZPAF, is particularly appropriate.[4]

Transposition is not copying. It implies a shift between different ways of organising an image while simultaneously changing its material form.

A photograph may be translated into layers of pigment.

An image may be transformed through colour and surface.

A composition may move from the logic of photographic representation towards the logic of the autonomous image.

Here gum functions as a medium of translation.

“Paleotica–Impositusy”: Photography and Digital Printing

The cycle “Paleotica–Impositusy” adds another important dimension to Mitka’s practice. These works were made on Fabriano graphic papers using digital printing.[1]

This distinction matters. The cycle should not be treated as another example of gum printing. Rather, it demonstrates that Mitka’s interest in image technology was never restricted to historical photographic processes. At a certain point, he expanded his practice to include digital printing.

The cycle therefore belongs to a broader field of technological and artistic experimentation in which different methods of materialising the image can be brought into play.

At the same time, its starting point is relevant to the question of photography and abstraction. Small fragments of urban matter — pieces of metal, sheet material, bottle caps and other objects embedded in asphalt — were photographed at close range and enlarged until their original context disappeared and they became autonomous forms.[6]

Abstraction, therefore, does not begin with the gum process.

It begins with a particular way of looking photographically.

The change of scale, the isolation of the fragment, and the emphasis on surface and texture transform a recognisable object into form, rhythm, and material presence. ZPAF likewise emphasized light, texture, and materiality in its discussion of the project.[6]

In this sense, Paleotica–Impositusy remains important to an understanding of Mitka’s work, but not as an example of gum printing. Rather, it demonstrates a broader interest in transforming photographic perception into autonomous visual form.

Abstraction and the Autonomy of the Image

Two parallel strategies of image-making can therefore be identified in Mitka’s practice.

The first extracts abstract form from reality through photography.

The second subjects the resulting image to further transformation through gum or another method of materialisation.

It would therefore be misleading to claim that abstraction appears only with the gum process. More accurately, gum becomes one of the tools through which a tendency already present in Mitka’s way of seeing can be further developed.

This is where the emphasis should shift from “painterliness” to the autonomy of the image.

In conventional terms, one might say that gum allows a photograph to be “worked over.” In Mitka’s case, that description is too narrow.

The viewer may eventually cease to perceive primarily the photographed object and instead encounter:

• colour,

• rhythm,

• layers,

• structure,

• texture,

• spatial relationships.

At that point photography is no longer merely a record.

It becomes material for constructing an image.

This is what makes Mitka’s abstract gum prints particularly significant in the history of alternative photographic processes. They are not simply designed to produce an atmospheric or painterly version of a photograph. They can produce images whose visual autonomy becomes more important than their photographic origin.

The Non-Photographic Matrix

The most radical extension of this principle is Mitka’s use of non-photographic negative matrices.

He describes making them by drawing or painting directly onto glass and transparent films, using oil-based and acrylic paints, markers, pens, and pencils. At the same time, these matrices are constructed so as to preserve qualities associated with a photographic negative: controlled opacity, halftone values, and graphic sharpness.[1]

This is a particularly revealing point in his practice because it exposes the boundary between photography and graphic art.

The source of the image does not have to be a photograph.

It may be a manually constructed matrix.

And yet the gum process remains photographic.

This distinction is essential. The photographic nature of a process does not necessarily depend on the image having a photographic origin.

Mitka’s practice demonstrates that it is possible to produce a photographic image without a photographic source.

That possibility is one of the most original aspects of his approach.

The Painter, Graphic Artist, and Conservator’s Workshop

Mitka himself connects these approaches with his broader professional experience:

“My painter’s workshop, conservation workshop, and gum-printing workshop use the same materials, tools, and technological and technical way of thinking.”[1]

The important point here is not simply the similarity of materials. It is the shared way of thinking about substance, layers, tools, and the behaviour of materials.

Conservation develops an analytical understanding of objects as material structures.

Painting builds an image through layers and the action of the hand.

Graphic art establishes a relationship between matrix and print.

In gum printing, these forms of knowledge meet within a single process.

Mitka’s practice can therefore be understood not as the accumulation of separate specialisations, but as the development of a single material and technological practice through different image-making systems.

Technological Discipline as a Condition of Freedom

Such openness does not imply randomness.

Mitka emphasizes:

“The gum process also requires technological discipline.”[1]

He keeps a working journal recording, among other things, the quantitative composition of gum paint, the pigments used, UV exposure times, colour tests, the opacity of individual layers, and exposure samples.[1]

This is closely connected with his experience in conservation. Recording the technical process preserves knowledge, but it also makes the process reproducible and consciously controllable.

The resulting tension is important:

the greater the freedom of interpretation, the greater the need for control over the process.

Freedom in the image is therefore grounded in technical discipline.

The Print as Feedback

Technical experience, however, does not eliminate unpredictability.

Mitka describes the moment when, after activating his established sequence of workshop procedures, an unexpected result may appear — sometimes a pleasant surprise that something can be done differently and produce a better effect.[1]

Even more revealing is his statement that individual prints “indicate what comes next.”[1]

This suggests an iterative model of artistic practice.

Each print is the result of earlier decisions, but it also becomes information for the next one.

The material therefore participates in the construction of the work.

The artist does not surrender control. Instead, he allows the process itself to provide feedback.

Edition and the Status of the Print

Another important question concerns editioning.

Mitka states that his method allows both unique prints and editions, while regarding each impression within an edition as an original work. Minor differences between impressions result from the manual character of the process and, in his view, have parallels in traditional graphic techniques.[1]

This places gum very close to the logic of printmaking.

The documentary record supports this position to some extent. Gum prints by Aleksander Mitka appear in auction catalogues with designations such as e/a (épreuve d’artiste), while gum prints associated with the Kantor cycle are numbered.[5][7]

This does not allow us to reconstruct the entire system by which Mitka organised his editions. It does, however, show that his gum prints also circulated within a field using the terminology and conventions of graphic art.

The graphic status of these works, therefore, is not simply a declaration made by the artist.

It also has an institutional and market dimension.

Kantor and the Transformation of the Document

A particularly important example of image transformation is provided by the photographs Mitka made in Tadeusz Kantor’s studio in 1968.

Twenty-three photographs from this body of work were later used to produce gum prints. The original negatives were scanned, processed, and transformed into large-format negatives for gum printing.[3]

Later catalogues identify the resulting works as GUM-BICHROMATE PRINTS, with individual impressions carrying edition numbers.[7]

This was not merely a technical change of scale or format.

A photograph made in 1968 re-emerged decades later as a new work.

The gum process thus became a means of reinterpreting photographic time.

The original document remained present, but acquired a new material form and a different artistic status.

The process can therefore be understood as giving an existing photograph a second life: an image can be reactivated at another point in time, through another technology, and under a different conception of the artwork.

Between Document and Autonomous Image

In Paleotica–Impositusy, photography begins with a concrete fragment of reality and moves towards abstraction, which is then materialised through digital printing on Fabriano graphic paper.[1][6]

In the Kantor cycle, a historical photographic document is transformed decades later into a gum-print object.[3][7]

In the Friezes and Paleotica – Amonity, gum can function as a form of “painterly transposition.”[4]

In works based on non-photographic matrices, the source of the image does not have to be photographic at all.[1]

These examples are connected by a common question:

what degree of autonomy can an image acquire in relation to its source?

This question is ultimately more significant than the choice of technique itself.

Photography may be the starting point, but it does not necessarily determine the final nature of the work.

From Pictorialism to Post-Pictorialism

Gum bichromate is historically inseparable from pictorialism. Its appeal partly lay in the possibility of weakening the automatic character of the photographic image through pigment, manual intervention, and the repeated application of layers.[2][4]

Mitka retains these possibilities, but redirects their function.

The purpose is no longer to prove that photography can become art by resembling painting.

Rather, the process becomes a means of moving the image freely between photography, graphic art, painting, and abstraction.

In this sense, the term post-pictorialist can be applied to Mitka’s practice.

Not because it rejects pictorialism, but because it inherits its technological possibilities while releasing them from their historical function.

Historical Technique as a Contemporary Tool

Mitka’s practice demonstrates that a historical process can remain radically open.

Gum can accommodate conventional photographic negatives, multiple pigment layers, colour, manually constructed matrices, unique prints, and editions. It can also be used to reactivate photographs made decades earlier.

Alongside this, digital printing enters his practice.[1]

These are not necessarily opposites. Rather, they reveal that for Mitka technology is a means of constructing the image, not an ideological boundary defining the medium.

The important issue is therefore not whether a technique is old or new, analogue or digital, photographic or graphic.

What matters is how a particular technology allows the intended image to exist materially.

“Paleotica – Somnium” and the Experience of the Novice

Mitka’s current return to the previously begun cycle “Paleotica – Somnium,” comprising thirty gum prints, demonstrates that the process remains open and active.[1]

He speaks of experiencing the “nervousness of a novice” when beginning a new project. Only later does the established sequence of workshop procedures take over, accompanied by the possibility of discovering a new solution.[1]

This is an important insight into the nature of working with gum.

Technical mastery does not eliminate experimentation.

On the contrary, mastery creates the conditions for controlled experimentation.

Experience provides the structure.

The material process continues to test its limits.

Gum Beyond Photography

The most important conclusion emerging from Mitka’s practice concerns not the history of gum itself, but the status of the image.

A photograph can become the material for a gum transposition. A manually constructed matrix can initiate a photographic process. A gum print can function within the field of graphic art. The same artist can also employ digital printing on graphic paper.

Under these conditions, the traditional separation between photography, graphic art, and other image-making practices becomes inadequate.

Photography does not disappear.

Rather, it can function as source, process, matrix, or material for further transformation.

This is perhaps the most significant feature of Mitka’s practice.

His work demonstrates that a historical photographic process need not be used simply to preserve a historical form.

It can become a contemporary method of constructing images whose identity is no longer determined by a single medium.

Conclusion

Gum bichromate emerged in the nineteenth century as a photographic process, but from the beginning it contained the potential to challenge the mechanical character of photographic reproduction. Pictorialists exploited that potential by increasing the role of pigment, the hand, and materiality.

Aleksander Mitka develops this potential in a distinctly contemporary direction.

His gum remains photography, but it does not have to result in photography in the conventional sense.

It can function as graphic art.

It can become a painterly transposition.

It can lead towards abstraction.

It can employ a hand-made matrix.

It can give a historical photograph a new material existence decades later.

It can exist as a unique print or as an edition.

And alongside it, digital printing can serve as another means of realising an artistic intention.[1]

This is why Mitka’s practice cannot be reduced to the preservation of a historical technique.

It demonstrates how many possibilities remain within a process that has more than a century of history.

The central question, therefore, is not whether gum belongs to photography or to graphic art.

Mitka’s practice suggests that it can belong to both — while opening a further space between them for painting, drawing, abstraction, and other forms of image construction.

Gum is not merely a historical technique to be preserved.

It remains a living instrument for constructing images.

Notes

[1] Aleksander Mitka, responses to research questions, 2026. First-person source concerning the beginnings of his photographic and gum-printing practice, his understanding of gum as photoprinting, its relationship to painting, drawing, photography, and conservation, non-photographic matrices, technological discipline, editioning, digital printing, and the ongoing cycle Paleotica – Somnium.

[2] Christina Z. Anderson, Gum Printing: A Step-by-Step Manual, Highlighting Artists and Their Creative Practice. Routledge, 2017.

[3] Aleksander Mitka, “Fotografie Kantora,” Biuletyn Fotograficzny, no. 12, 2003. Material concerning photographs made in Tadeusz Kantor’s studio in 1968 and their later transformation into gum prints.

[4] Association of Polish Art Photographers (ZPAF), “Aleksander Mitka – ‘Gumografie’ – wystawa w krakowskiej Galerii Bielec,” 2014. Material describing the relationship between Mitka’s photographic, painterly, and drawing practices and referring to the Friezes and Paleotica – Amonity as “painterly transpositions.”

[5] Artinfo.pl, archive of works by Aleksander Mitka. The archive documents, among other things, multi-layered gum prints, e/a designations, the Friezes, and works related to photographs made in Tadeusz Kantor’s studio.

[6] Association of Polish Art Photographers (ZPAF), “Aleksander Mitka: ‘Paleotica-Impositusy’ – wystawa w Krakowie,” 2014. The source describes the transformation of small fragments of urban matter into abstract photographic forms.

[7] Museum of Photography in Krakow, online catalogue “Aleksander Mitka,” together with auction materials concerning the Kantor cycle. These sources document his activity in photography, graphic art, and noble processes, as well as the presence of his works in institutional and collecting contexts.

Bibliography

Anderson, Christina Z. Gum Printing: A Step-by-Step Manual, Highlighting Artists and Their Creative Practice. Routledge, 2017.

Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Reaktion Books, 2000.

Hinkel, Brad, and Ron Reeder. Digital Negatives: Using Photoshop to Create Digital Negatives for Silver and Alternative Process Printing. Focal Press, 2006.

Mitka, Aleksander. “Fotografie Kantora.” Biuletyn Fotograficzny, no. 12, 2003.

Association of Polish Art Photographers. “Aleksander Mitka – ‘Gumografie’ – wystawa w krakowskiej Galerii Bielec,” 2014.

Association of Polish Art Photographers. “Aleksander Mitka: ‘Paleotica-Impositusy’ – wystawa w Krakowie,” 2014.

Artinfo.pl. Archive of works by Aleksander Mitka.

Museum of Photography in Krakow. Online catalogue: Aleksander Mitka.