John Lynn and the need to make an image by hand

 

Two Boys with Zenits

There is a coincidence in John Lynn’s story that initially seems like nothing more than a charming anecdote. John began photographing with a Zenit EM. I began with a Zenit 11. The two cameras belong to the same Soviet design lineage, with the Zenit 11 developed as a successor to the EM.[1] Two cameras from the same technological world, linking two lives that began in very different parts of the world.

The longer we talked, the more parallels emerged. John entered the printing industry at the age of seventeen, working in a prepress department connected with offset printing. I started in prepress too, first with CTF, later CTP and digital imposition. John remembers being fascinated by the way pages for books and magazines were arranged, and by the almost magical moment when an apparently chaotic sheet suddenly made sense after folding and trimming. I was most interested in book production myself. When we began talking about older printing technologies, even Cromalin proofs came up. They were another reminder of a time when colour had to be consciously built, controlled and translated into a physical object.

After that, our paths diverged. John moved through the successive stages of printing’s digital transformation, worked in digital publishing and interactive media, and spent more than thirty years teaching. I remained in the printing industry and now oversee the entire production process. Photography, however, remained something more than a profession for both of us. After many years, we both found our way back to processes in which an image does not simply remain a file or emerge from a printer, but has to be physically made.

That is where John’s story really begins to interest me.

John Lynn did not discover gum bichromate because he wanted to return to the past. His trajectory points in almost the opposite direction. He is someone who has lived through several technological eras and, only after experiencing them, deliberately chose processes that require him to take responsibility once again for the physical making of an image.

You could say that he returned to where he began, but he returned there as a completely different person.

From accuracy to unpredictability

John’s first encounter with photography came at school. His art teacher, Ken Palmer, offered photography as an alternative to painting and drawing. Behind the teacher’s desk was a darkroom that the pupils had assumed was simply a storage cupboard. John was the only student taking photography that year. Under the red safelight, he discovered the magic of developing and printing. He remembers the darkroom as a kind of refuge, a place where he could be alone and work through an image. [2]

That scene stays with me because, decades later, John created a similar space for himself again. After moving from Scotland to Melbourne, he set up his own studio. Almost everything about the technology had changed, but the need for a place where he could stop, concentrate and work with an image at his own pace remained. His later professional history makes the story even more interesting. Traditional printing demanded accuracy, control and repeatability. The image had to be prepared correctly and reproduced consistently. In black-and-white photography, tonal control became central. Digital technology introduced another set of possibilities for manipulating images. John does not romanticise the past, either. He readily acknowledges that Photoshop is a valuable tool and does not divide the world into good analogue and bad digital. [2]

And yet, having experienced the possibilities of digital imaging, he became drawn to processes in which some of that control can once again be taken into the maker’s hands, while some of it can be surrendered to the process itself.
With gum bichromate, he enjoys building an image through successive colour layers, waiting for the paper to dry, recoating it and beginning again. Gum oil presents an even more open problem, because the image has to be worked out in response to a whole range of variables. Cyanotype gives him something different again: the almost childlike pleasure of watching an image appear during development. [2] His return, then, is not really a return to one particular process. It is a return to the experience of physically making an image.

John’s attitude to control has changed as well. At a certain point in life, accuracy ceases to be an absolute value. He writes that, as he gets older, he no longer stresses about imperfections or tries to achieve “scientific accuracy”. What matters more is understanding the difference between the accuracy of an image and its effect. [2] For someone who came out of a culture of industrial reproduction, that is a profound shift. In commercial printing, variation from one copy to another is a problem. In gum printing, variation can become part of the value of the print.

John says that unpredictability makes the final image personal and impossible to reproduce exactly. It is one of the most revealing statements in our entire exchange. [2] Something that would once have been regarded as a defect in a production process can, in the artist’s studio, become a sign of individuality. Perhaps that is why his fascination with CMYK gum printing is more than a technical interest. Four colours that once belonged to an industrial system of reproduction return in a hand-made process. The same person who once helped produce images intended to be repeatable is now making images that he cannot, and perhaps does not want to, reproduce identically.

For this reason, I would not describe what John is doing as a “return to analogue”. It is closer to the return of an old body of knowledge in a completely different context.

The image that remains

Another question emerged in our conversations that is difficult to ignore today: what happens to trust in images in the age of generative AI? John wonders whether, as images, films and other forms of creative work become increasingly easy to generate, we may begin to care again about knowing how they were actually made. He does not claim that a hand-made print is automatically more authentic. What matters to him is that a physical object carries the evidence of a particular process, a particular amount of time and a particular set of skills.

That is an interesting shift in emphasis. We have long been accustomed to thinking of photography as a trace of something that once stood in front of the lens. André Bazin described photography in terms of its special relationship to reality and time, while Roland Barthes later explored the photograph as testimony to something that had once been there.[3][4] The question facing us now is slightly different. We are increasingly asking not only whether something existed in front of the camera, but also whether the image itself was actually made by a person, and how.

In that context, the hand-made print may acquire a different kind of significance. Not because it is automatically more truthful than a digital print, but because it does not completely conceal its own making. The paper, pigment, layers and traces of the process are physically present. John would like a future viewer not only to see the image, but to understand that a particular method stands behind it.[2]

This is where the two technological worlds John has lived through seem to meet. In commercial printing, the process was supposed to disappear. The ideal result was a faithful reproduction in which the technology became invisible. In gum printing, something almost opposite can happen: the process comes to the surface. Registration marks, pigment at the edges, brush marks or subtle differences between layers no longer have to be treated as flaws. They can remind the viewer that the image did not simply appear.

Perhaps that matters more now than it once did. In our conversations, we also touched on an idea that I recognise very strongly from my own practice: some prints are made, in a sense, for other practitioners. Most viewers will never notice the difference between a very good CMYK gum print and a superb inkjet print. Someone who knows the process will see much more. They will notice the registration, tonal transitions, colour separation, the quality of the layers and the way the pigment has been handled. Sometimes it is worth extending the work on a print by another two days simply to achieve an effect that most viewers will never recognise. Not because the viewer has to know. Because the maker knows.

That way of thinking connects John’s experience very closely to my own. Working on my current project, I increasingly feel that some of the decisions I make about the quality of a print are not really for a hypothetical audience. I already have the theoretical framework for the project and I know how I would like to present it. I still do not know whether I will ever actually show it. And yet I keep making another test, another layer, another version of the process.

I am doing it for myself. And for my family.

That is why I understand so well what John says about his own work. He wants to build a body of around 150–200 photographs. He has about fifty so far. And he admits that even if they are never shown in a gallery, he wants them to remain as a record of what he was passionate about, for his family.[2] That is a striking position in a world where creative work is increasingly measured by visibility: exhibitions, publications, audiences, sales, social media presence. Everything is expected to be seen. John proposes something else. A photograph can still matter even when it is not intended for a large public.

It can exist simply because someone wanted to make it. Perhaps it can even be made for someone who has not yet been born.

John quotes Saul Leiter in this context, recalling his remark about a “little book” of photographs. The remark does not seem to be about building a grand career so much as about reaching a point where a small, personal body of work might be enough.[5] John takes that idea one step further. He wants his grandchildren or great-grandchildren to be able to look at his work and understand something about the person who made it.[2]

At that point, photography stops being primarily an object made for the public. It becomes an archive.
And I think this is where John’s story becomes more than the story of one photographer.

I do not know whether his work will ever be shown in a gallery. I do not know whether his experiments with gum oil will eventually lead him to a process he considers fully resolved. I am not even sure that John needs such an ending. His answers suggest that what interests him is the continuation of the journey. “So much to learn, so many processes” does not sound like a conclusion. It sounds like a reason to return to the studio the next day.[2]

Perhaps that is why two boys who once started out with Zenits on opposite sides of the world now find themselves meeting, in a sense, over paper, pigments and another round of testing.

Not to return to the past. But to preserve something that the future may no longer be able to do for us.

Maybe the real value of John’s current practice is not cyanotype, gum bichromate or even photography. It is the possibility of remaining a student: someone who has spent a lifetime with images and still wants to test something, improve something, repeat something, understand something. And when, one day, somebody comes across one of his prints, touches the paper, sees the pigment and reads the name of the process on the back, they may ask not only, “Who made this?” but also, “Why did someone want to spend so much time making it?”

Perhaps that will be the most important thing John leaves behind.

Not an answer.

A trace of the question.

Notes

[1] ZENITcamera, “ЗЕНИТ-11”, materiały archiwalne dotyczące historii aparatów z linii Zenit-E, https://www.zenitcamera.ru/archive/zenit-e/index.html, dostęp: 24 września 2026.

[2] J. Lynn, odpowiedzi na kwestionariusz badawczy autora oraz korespondencja prywatna, 2026.

[3] A. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”, Film Quarterly, vol. 13, nr 4, 1960, s. 4–9.

[4] R. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981, s. 76–91.

[5] In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter, reż. Tomas Leach, Wielka Brytania/USA, 2013.