by Mark Coggins

View Camera, September/October 1999

In the spring of 1971, in the midst of his undergraduate education at San Francisco State, Mark Citret brought a print of a photograph he had taken in Halcott, New York to a photography class critique. Titled Shadows on Snow, it was an image of sinewy elm tree shadows projecting over a snow-covered slope toward a wooded horizon. Citret had spent many hours in the darkroom making a print of this delicate image that he felt was just right.

Orthodox practice in the tradition of “straight photography” would have called for a print with a tonal range that went from a pure white to a solid black. But to Citret’s mind, the image was too brittle and harsh with a total black or a pure white—let alone both. He elected to print the photograph in an understated way with a subtle range of muted grays.

He was entirely unprepared for the storm of controversy this decision engendered during the class session and many weeks afterward. It seemed the whole photography department from his fellow undergrads to the graduate students to the professors themselves demanded that he disavow his decision and reprint the image in the orthodox manner.

Citret stuck to his guns, but was much battered and bruised by the experience and began to doubt his own artistic instincts. Fortunately, that same spring he sought further inspiration in a class taught by Ruth Bernhard at another institution. During the first session, she asked each student to place a selection of work in front of the class for her review and critique. Citret choose to display Shadows on Snow, and as Bernhard leaned close to the photograph, staring at it for nearly a minute without remark, he became fearful he would be subjected to yet another strongly-worded criticism of his artistic judgment.

Instead, to his surprise and relief, Bernhard turned, fixed him with a penetrating stare, and said, “I am glad that you are in the class.”

A gratifying postscript to the story occurred when Citret visited Ansel Adams at his Carmel studio several weeks later to show Adams some of his recent work. (Citret served as Adams’ field and darkroom assistant at numerous Yosemite workshops during the early 70’s.) Adams looked through the collection of prints Citret had brought and when he came to Shadows on Snow, he paused to gaze at it in his lap for several moments. Abruptly he turned to Citret and blurted, “What do you get for prints these days? I want to buy this one!” Thus the high priest of straight photography demonstrated his own disregard for slavish adherence to orthodoxy.

While Citret learned much from Adams about technique and greatly admired his ability to create tour de force images of achingly beautiful scenes in nature, in terms of artistic vision Citret has much more in common with Bernhard. It was from Bernhard he learned that the things you tend to take for granted are the richest veins to be mined in making images. He learned, as he says, “to see and appreciate the utterly spectacular in the totally ordinary.”

Now, almost 30 years since he first exposed the negative for Shadows on Snow, Citret has published a monograph titled Along the Way that includes the photograph so admired by Bernhard and Adams, as well as a survey of the many other “utterly spectacular” images found in the “totally ordinary” during the course of his career. Indeed, when one looks at photographs such as Access Doors or Indoor Pool, one can easily imagine walking by the locales where they were taken with a tripod and 4x5 camera and not pausing an instant to consider setting up for the shot. Yet the photographs Citret discovered in these locales have a subtle, delicate beauty that demand your attention.

Robert Bresson, the brilliant French cinematographer, speaking about the purpose of art once said, “Make visible what, without you, might never have been seen.”

Coastside Plant: A Turning Point

If there was one photograph in Mark Citret’s portfolio that is most closely associated with him and his style, it would be Empty Room. Empty Room was taken during a period from 1991 to 1993 that Citret spent photographing an immense construction site along the coast in the Southwest corner of San Francisco. Citret views his experiences at the site as being pivotal in a number of respects. First, it was a time when he came to understand that the lines between landscape and architectural photography had blurred for him: that he no longer felt his work could or should be pigeon-holed into one category or the other. As Citret says, “what drew me to the site from the start was not that it was a building in the process of becoming, or even that it presented such interesting shapes, volumes and textures. Instead, what drew me was that it was a landscape that changed, both subtly and dramatically, on a daily basis.” This realization led Citret to develop a concept he calls “architectural geology.”

In brief, architectural geology refers to the idea that the human-made environment is no less a reflection of the forces of nature than scenes traditionally regarded as landscape—at least visually, if not sociologically. A geologist might say that natural forces fall into two categories: those that create landforms and those that erode them. Citret argues that the same two categories apply to architecture, but holds that the natural force that creates architecture is humanity itself.

The concept is illustrated clearly in his work, whether one considers pictures made before, during, or after his experience at the coast-side plant. For example, an early photograph like Sutro Ruins #2 melds rocks, sea, sky and the crumbling foundation of the San Francisco Sutro Baths to create a hauntingly beautiful image with no discordant elements.

In tandem with his realization about architectural geology, Citret made two important breakthroughs in his photographic technique. The first was an extension to the Zone System. By the early 70’s, Citret had discovered that the classic Zone System as defined and practiced by Adams and Fred Archer had shortcomings when applied to modern, thin emulsion films. In particular, Adam’s approach for holding detail in highlights when the ranges of values between shadows and highlights was too great was to underdevelop the film—either by reducing the duration of the development or by employing a “water bath” treatment. These techniques, Citret discovered, did not work well with modern films because they retarded development of all values, not just the highlights. The result was a muddy negative with insufficient detail, especially in the shadow values.

Citret continued to use the Zone System during exposure to get the best range of printable values on film, but when he began to photograph at the coast-side plant, he encountered conditions that cried out for a new approach to manipulating development for value compression. At the construction site he found huge concrete interiors illuminated by quartz halogen lights with a 10-12-zone range between highlights and shadows. This range was at least twice what can be held on standard films, and no amount of careful placement of values during exposure would compensate for the problem.

Citret’s solution was to not to reduce the duration of the development as Adams had done, but to radically dilute the strength of the developer. He found that diluting the developer deprived the film of energy, but still permitted development times of sufficient duration. And because highlights require both energy and duration to develop completely, but shadows require mainly duration, the approach provides a means to bring shadows and highlights together within a printable range while maintaining good separation in the shadow values. To provide a sensitometric explanation, Citret’s technique has the effect of moving the shadow values further onto the straight-line section of the film’s characteristic curve (away from the toe). Highlights, on the other hand, are given an almost infinite shoulder.

Citret employs the technique whenever he finds a situation where the range is more than five to six Zones. In addition to a development modification, the technique also requires a change in exposure. To capture adequate detail in the shadows, Citret places them in Zone V or VI—which is, of course, a much higher placement on the scale than they would normally receive. Citret has dubbed the technique “-3 development,” which initially was a reference to its use in handling situations with three Zones beyond the printable scale. He now uses the technique regardless of the number of Zones he is compensating for, anywhere from one to four or even more.

Another refinement to technique that Citret developed during this time was in the area of printing. He discovered a paper made by Kodak called Polyfiber A. Although he disliked the paper’s tonality—it was green and flat looking—he was attracted to other attributes of it, including its light weight and smooth, vellum-like surface. Experimenting with commercially available toning solutions, he stumbled upon an unusual procedure involving selenium and sepia toner that did astonishing things to the paper. Not only did the process replace the greenish tone for a warmer one, but it did so in a way that accelerated the warmth into the highlights and added great depth to the images. Citret refers to the resulting prints as “vellum prints” to convey the delicate, soft, but luminous images he creates with the materials and process.

Although Kodak no longer makes the paper, Citret enlisted their help to locate and stockpile a large quantity of it for future work. He anticipates he will be using it well into the 21st century.

Where to Stand, Where to Put the Edges

When describing his approach to capturing images, Citret contends that an aspect of the photographic process that is often overlooked or taken for granted—yet is at the heart of photography—is the consideration of the following questions: "Where do I stand?" and "Where do I put the edges?" These questions, he says, “are the fulcrum between the initial inspiration to make a photograph, and its subsequent execution.”

The decision of where to stand, or more precisely where to put the camera, determines the linear relationships within the subject. Citret feels this decision is the most critical and the one that must be made first. The lens must occupy that one point in space from which all the objects in front of the camera are arranged most advantageously. Indoor Pool is an example of a photograph where the decision of where to stand was of prime importance. Without setting his tripod up in the pool, Citret would not have captured the peaks of the houses outside the pool building in the misty frame of window—and the image would have suffered as a result.

Answering the second question, "Where do I put the edges?" relates to finding the best balance between the information you include and information you exclude. In achieving that balance, determining what to exclude is often the far more difficult decision. As Citret says, “placement of the edges is crucial to isolating the subject from the chaos surrounding it: the conflicting, the extraneous, the distracting.”

Although some photographers (such as Edward Weston) believe that the decision of what to exclude must be executed at the time the photograph is taken—i.e., that the borders of the negative exactly correspond to the borders of the finished print—Citret does not frown upon cropping. If you accept the premise that where you stand comes first, you may not always have a lens of appropriate focal length to place the edges exactly where you want them. Using a wider-than-ideal lens to capture all of the information you need and cropping out extraneous detail later is a perfectly acceptable expedient.

Further Along: After Along the Way

During a trip to supervise the printing of Along the Way, Citret incorporated a photographic expedition to Northern Italy, where he took pictures he feels are among the best he has made to date. And now that the book has been released, he hopes to publish three other monographs for which he has already completed the majority of the work: Halcott Center, Coastside Plant, and Unnatural Wonders: Architecture in the National Parks.

Teaching has always been important to Citret, and he plans to continue. As he says, “it is satisfying to see students progress, and teaching also helps to replenish my ability to articulate my goals and philosophy. I find that photographers who work alone without student interaction become almost mute on those scores.”

Last, and most important, he intends to give his Muse free reign in the years to come, hoping to capture subjects that are uniquely his. But he is quick to point out that he is as much a spectator as anyone else in the process and is frankly curious to see the results.

It is well that he accepted this destiny, for as Ruth Bernhard said recently to Citret, “Mark, you are a wonderful photographer and there is nothing you can do about it.”

Notes on Technique

Mark Citret uses Sinar Norma and Toyo VX125 4x5 view cameras. He likes the Norma’s stability and durability, but appreciates the light weight and bellows versatility of the Toyo. He has a large selection of wide angle lenses for commercial architectural work, but employs a basic set of four for all else: a 72mm SuperAngulon XL, a 110mm SuperSymmar XL, a 180mm Fujinon W and a 300mm Fujinon C. He finds it advantageous to mount all his lenses on the smaller Linof lens boards to reduce the space they take in his bag as well as make moving between cameras easier.

He generally uses T-MAX 100 film in 4x5 Readyloads and develops the film using a 1:49 dilution of Agfa Rodinal with nine minutes duration for normal development, and a 1:149 dilution at 12 minutes for his “-3 development.”

As described in the article, he uses Kodak Polyfiber A paper with a special toning process of his own invention to produce his “vellum” prints for gallery work. And because there is a finite supply of the Kodak paper, he makes his first prints on Sterling Semi-Gloss VC paper with selenium and sepia toning.

About the Author

Mark Coggins is a San Francisco writer, web designer and amateur 4x5 photographer.