One of the great pleasures of alt process printing is that it gives you complete and total freedom of paper choice. Not all papers will work of course, but you can always experiment. I recently dug out some old negatives to give a try with a Japanese Kozo paper, the lightweight variety which is very thin, translucent, but still has excellent wet strength. It’s a very soft paper, so it loses detail, and lends itself to images that have perhaps too much to be flattering – a great portrait paper.

These are some nudes I did with it of a transgender friend of mine – traditional develop-out Palladium prints to give that nice rich brown tone to the shadows. I think the Kozo paper works very well with these images because it also implies the skin nature of the image – a surface with a depth behind it. It’s a comment on the nature of being trans – that the skin of a person is just one layer of who they are.