The footballers is a series of photographs that Donna Bailey produced with her son's junior football team, the Quarry Hill Under-12s. Each of the boys has posed for an individual portrait as though his mug-shot might appear on a collectable footy-card or in the weekly Football Record. As a team, they beam with ambition and dreams, but Bailey's large-scale prints also capture the vulnerability and individual awkwardness of the boys on their way to becoming men. She fosters a particularly interesting relationship with her young subjects, encouraging them to collaborate in the staging and composition of the images. They discuss wardrobe suggest props and strike their own poses. This approach gives her photographs an edgy aspect, which flickers between a parent collecting memories and children imagining their futures.
(2014)
Chromogenic prints are printed on paper that has at least three emulsion layers containing invisible dyes and silver salts. Each emulsion layer is sensitive to a different primary colour of light (red, green or blue). The development process converts the hidden dyes to visible colour depending on the amount of light it was exposed to. This type of paper is commonly used to print from colour negatives or digital files to produce a full-colour image. It can also be used to print black-and-white images, giving softer grain and less contrast than gelatin silver prints. Commonly known as c-type prints, chromogenic processing was developed in the 1940s and widely used for colour printing, including for domestic snapshots. While recent years have seen this process accompanied by ink-jet and digital printing technologies, chromogenic printing still remains in use to this day.