Montana State’s Christina Anderson wins national educator award

BOZEMAN - Magic happens in the quiet of Montana State University's darkroom, said photography professor Christina Z. Anderson. And she is the magician.

Under her watchful eye, colors emerge in a photograph's white spaces where there were none before. Chemical solutions eat away at an image's gelatin coating, creating delicate black lines that drape over the photograph like a veil. These alternative photographic processes, which are handmade techniques developed as early as the 1800s, have been the focus of Anderson's classes and research since she began teaching in MSU's School of Film and Photography in 2000.

For her impact on students and the field of photography, Anderson received the Society of Photographic Education's Honored Educator Award in November. SPE, a national nonprofit founded in 1962, will present Anderson with the award in March at its annual conference in Atlanta. She is the sole recipient of the award this year, nominated for sharing her wealth of information with students, celebrating their victories and advocating for new learning opportunities, according to the award announcement.

"When I'm gone, if I'm known as a teacher and not an artist, that is fine by me," said Anderson, an MSU alumna with degrees in photography and painting. "I love to do my artwork and photography, but my mentoring is much more important to me."

This fall, she is mentoring students in experimental black-and-white darkroom photography, senior production photography, and image and text design. Anderson said she is not a "sage on the stage" - instead, she views teaching as peer mentorship, where she learns from students just as much as they learn from her.

She often names innovative processes after the students who discover them. In 2009, her darkroom class was experimenting outdoors with mordançage, a technique using an acidified copper solution to bleach a black-and-white image and lift its silver gelatin coating, so students can shape the resulting shadows to create unique forms. The temperature outside was too cold for hydrogen peroxide solutions to oxidize and properly dissolve the gelatin, so a student created a warm water bath for a photograph between dipping it in solutions, a process henceforth named the "Jace Becker technique," Anderson said.

In her darkroom labs located in MSU's Visual Communications Building, students are engaged in a way that doesn't translate to digital editing. Although they can create an effect with the push of a button in Photoshop, they gain a deeper understanding of the art form when doing it by hand, particularly in MSU's "top-notch" facilities, Anderson said. Students can develop photographs in several individual and group darkrooms and dim labs equipped with UV lights, film processors and print dryers.

Jon Lau, a junior studying integrated lens-based media, said most images made in the labs are one of one: No two images are ever the same, and they can never be reproduced. As part of his final project in Anderson's class, he will travel to nearby ghost towns and apply a warm, vintage tone to his photographs using a process called lith.

"It's forcing me to loosen my grip on what I want out of my photography," said Lau, who is from Las Vegas, Nevada. "I usually like to know exactly how it's going to look. This class allows you to let go and relax and have more fun with it, which is helpful to learn as you get into your later production classes when sometimes you're too focused on making something good."

He said Anderson is invested in making sure students create images they like and in providing the resources - paper, chemicals and time - to do so.

Anderson said she wants to give students a "cookbook" of knowledge they can use to make great art, hoping to one day be considered the Julia Child of alternative processes. She has published six books on individual processes, which have been sold in more than 40 countries. Although she is considered one of the top experts in her field, she is loath to be a gatekeeper of technical secrets.

"I absolutely love to research. I love to dive in depth into whatever it is I'm doing, read every book on it, write about it, etc., etc.," Anderson said. "But if I were to just stuff that in my mind and not share it - what a waste. There's no purpose to research unless you share it."

She shares more than 50 processes with students in her labs. Her students produce professional-level work, many examples of which are included in her published books and kept on file as inspiration for current students. Fostering success for younger generations of photographers is simply who Anderson is, said Jim Zimpel, interim director of the School of Film and Photography and associate dean of the College of Arts and Architecture.

"It's really what makes land-grant universities beautiful: We're all experts in different things, and we bring those passions to students so they can learn from people who are experts in a field," he said.

Each year without fail, Anderson said, she tears up when her students walk across the stage at MSU's commencement ceremony. Many go on to become professional artists, graphic designers, wedding photographers, filmmakers, studio owners and educators. Much like her own professor expressed when she was a graduate student at Clemson University, she hopes students don't leave thinking they know everything - they will never get to a point where they have "arrived" and finished all they've set out to do.

"There's always a goal that's not quite attainable, and that's what keeps it interesting," Anderson said. "It has not gotten old for me yet."