Abby Leon, Paradigm Gallery Director
The FWMoA Paradigm Gallery hosts handmade work for sale from over 80 artists! These pieces vary in style, materials, and scale. It’s the perfect spot to shop for a unique gift or find a piece of art for youself! We love hearing from Paradigm’s artists—often local to Fort Wayne or the Midwest—and through our Let’s Talk SHOP series, we highlight our community of creators and their process.
Jarrid Spicer’s photography offers a fresh, contemplative lens on the world around us. With a Bachelor’s degree from Indiana University and a Master’s from Savannah College of Art and Design, he holds over two decades of experience behind the camera. He has exhibited and published work across both academic and professional spaces.
His fine art series, particularly those created through cyanotype, explore themes of place, memory and the passage of time. Using this early photographic process, Jarrid creates striking blue-toned images that feel archival and immediate, inviting viewers to slow down and consider the subtle beauty of everyday environments.
J: My work begins with the camera, but it rarely ends there. I am deeply drawn to the photographic process itself—especially the slow, tactile experience of the darkroom. While digital photography can produce technically perfect images, I’m more interested in what happens when those images are reinterpreted through historical and alternative printing processes.
Much of my work starts with photographs of trees and landscapes, subjects that feel both timeless and quietly powerful. I capture them digitally and on film, then bring them into the darkroom where they are transformed through older, often unpredictable methods of printing. Processes such as cyanotype and other alternative techniques introduce variation, texture, and chance—elements that move the photograph away from simple documentation and toward something more interpretive.
I’m fascinated by the tension between control and unpredictability. A digital file can be endlessly refined, but when it is translated through hand-coated papers, chemistry, and light, it begins to take on a life of its own. Subtle shifts in exposure, chemistry, and material can produce unexpected results, and those surprises are often where the most interesting images emerge.
For me, photography is not just about capturing a moment—it’s about rediscovering it. By revisiting contemporary digital images through historic processes, I’m able to slow the image down, giving it new character, depth, and a sense of time.
Cyanotype process:
The process begins with a digital negative printed at the same size as the final image. I first mark the paper, so I know exactly where to coat the emulsion. In the lab, I mix equal parts potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate to create the light-sensitive solution used in the cyanotype process.
The solution is brushed onto the paper and allowed to dry. Once dry, the negative and coated paper are sandwiched together in a contact printing frame. The frame is then placed under UV exposure lights. One advantage of the contact frame is that I can open part of the image during exposure to check the progress and determine when the exposure is complete.
When the exposure looks right, the print moves to the darkroom sink for processing. The first tray is plain water, which washes away the unexposed chemicals over about five to ten minutes. The print is then placed briefly—about thirty seconds—in a diluted hydrogen peroxide bath to deepen the shadow tones, followed by another five-to-ten-minute wash. After that, the print is hung to dry.
Once dry, there are many options for toning. For this image, the print was first placed in a sodium carbonate bleaching bath for about thirty seconds, then transferred to a tannic acid toner until the color and contrast reached the desired look.
There are countless variables in a process like this. Even when making two prints at the same time, the results are never perfectly identical. That slight unpredictability is part of the beauty—unexpected variations often lead to some of the most interesting and unique results.
Visit the Paradigm Gallery to check out some of Jarrid Spicer’s variables in this stunning Morel photograph and to see his other series of work on display!
Paradigm hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10am-6pm; Thursday 10am-8pm; Sunday 12pm-5pm.