Vaune Trachtman
Vaune Trachtman is a photographer and printmaker whose work honors the methods and tone of historic processes, but without the toxic chemicals. Formerly a master printer of silver gelatin prints and asphaltum-based photogravures, she began to feel that her immune-system was being compromised by those processes. She now makes gravures with little more than sunlight and water. Her images explore the evanescence of dreams and memory— a "fleeting, wondrous, sacred habitation" (Collier Brown, Od Review).
Vaune was among the winners of the 2018 Alternative Processes National Competition and was shortlisted for the 2019 International Hariban Prize. Her series NOW IS ALWAYS is supported by the Vermont Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, and is a semi-finalist in The Print Center’s 95th ANNUAL International Competition. NOW IS ALWAYS was exhibited at the Griffin Museum of Photography and the Vermont Center for Photography in 2021.
Vaune was born in Philadelphia and received her M.A. from NYU and the International Center of Photography. She lives in Brattleboro, VT.
Artist Statement
The images in NOW IS ALWAYS are the result of a collaboration I’m having with my father, who was born in 1914 and died in 1971.
There is obviously a personal aspect to NOW IS ALWAYS, but I want the work to be more expansive than a dialogue between the father I didn’t know and the daughter he knew only as a child. In this work, I want to create a feeling of collapsed-yet-expanded time. Yes, I want to see what my father saw, and yes, I want him to see what I see. But I also want the viewer to look at the past, and I want the past to look right back; I want the viewer and the subject to each feel the gaze of the other. And by combining images taken almost a century apart, I also want to seamlessly integrate layers of technology and image-making history: his 1930’s point-and-shoot, my iPhone, his silver-gelatin negatives, my Photoshop files, our shared sunlight and water, and the traditions of ink, elbow grease, and an intaglio press.
At Tusen Takk
Vaune printed several plates from her NOW IS ALWAYS series in A1, a scale at which she would have been unable to do in her home studio. Vaune worked in a photogravure process, first printing her images using an inkjet printer onto a photopolymer plate, exposing the plate to light, inking the plate, and running the plate through the etching press.
Tusen Takk’s Founder Geoffrey reflected on the nuances and intricacies of Vaune’s process in his blog post “Many Ways to Right.”
Prints created at Tusen Takk were exhibited at the Griffin Museum of Photography and the Vermont Center for Photography.
Reverie, from NOW IS ALWAYS, 2021
Installation view of NOW IS ALWAYS, Vermont Center for Photography, 2021
Public Programs
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