Andrew Burns’ portfolio was given Special Recognition for the 2025 Denis Roussel Awards.

Would you please tell us about yourself?

I’m an engineer and photographic artist working with alternative process and experimental printing techniques including cyanotype, carbon transfer and photopolymer, living in Auckland, New Zealand. I consider myself to be a process artist, as to me the process of creating the work is inseparable from the work itself and equally if not more important than the photograph I use as a starting point. I’m a physical, tactile person and I draw inspiration from the way materials and chemicals behave as I work with them. Nothing is complete to me until it exists as a tangible object in the real-world that can be touched, smelled and manipulated.

Where did you get your photographic training?

I’ve never received any formal photographic training and am self-taught. I started with a digital camera I got for christmas in around 2010, however it wasn’t until I started using film (initially 35mm and then large format) in around 2018 that I really found what I was looking for. I think the physical nature of film photography was the missing piece for me. These days I actually shoot with a digital camera more than film but I get my tactile fix from printing instead.

Who has had an influence on your creative process?

As a relatively young person and living where I do in New Zealand in a far-away corner of the planet I haven’t actually met or interacted with many artists in-person, the majority of my interactions with other people and their work have been online. I’m part of a small collective of like-minded photographers scattered between the USA, Europe and Australia who talk more-or-less daily in a private chat group. I also follow, get inspired by and occasionally talk to a few alt-process printers around the world, specifically Michael Strickland in the USA, Calvin Grier in Spain and Stuart Clook in New Zealand.

Please tell us about an image (not your own) that has stayed with you over time.

Really hard to answer this question with a single image, I think I’d have to say that the work of both Adam Katseff and Ron Jude have huge appeal to me.

What image of yours would you say taught you an important lesson?

Probably one of the first images I printed using my current toned-cyanotype process. I was trawling through my back-catalogue to see if there were photos that had some appeal I’d missed in the past with an eye to where my practice was currently and I found one I’d taken with a cheap digital camera in 2015 at mount Taranaki, on the west coast of New Zealand. When I printed this in toned cyanotype it took on an entirely new dimension compared to the digital photo, and it really hit me how important the printing process was and how much power process had to tie together otherwise disparate images into a single body of work that all shared a particular feel and emotional resonance.

The Taranaki Signal © Andrew Burns

Please tell us about the work you submitted to Denis Roussel Award.

I submitted a number of landscape photos made using cyanotype toned with coffee. They were all taken in the last 10 years or so, on various formats (film and digital, colour and B&W), digitally edited and then brought back under the same roof so to speak through the print. I’ve developed a novel method of contact printing these images by placing a transparent monochrome LCD screen onto the sensitised paper and then using UV light shining through the screen to expose the image. I find this gives me great control over the end result, but I also appreciate the circularity of taking an industrial electronic component that only exists due to the adoption of fine-art printing processes by industry (embodied in the printed circuit board and silicon chip lithography) and bending these industrial devices back to artistic use.

What part of image-making do you find the most rewarding?

Definitely when the image is revealed on the paper during development. A lot of work goes into alternative process printing, some processes take multiple days of prep to make a single print, there are so many ways for things to go wrong along the way and often you don’t even get a hint at what the result is going to look like until the end when you have no ability to make adjustments. So when the print is finally developing or toning and it materialises in the way that I had imagined it, it’s an extremely rewarding process.

Key Summit © Andrew Burns

How do you work through times when nothing seems to work?

The hard times so to speak are a fact of life and are also a crucial and inescapable part of the process. When I’m working away at something and nothing is working I can honestly find it pretty distressing at times, I get obsessed with something and it’s almost physically painful. But I just have to keep reminding myself that labour itself has intrinsic value, even if what you’re producing with that labour in the immediate sense isn’t what you want, the effort of going through the process isn’t going to be wasted and it always results in valuable lessons and personal growth. Ultimately you might never get where you thought you would, but you might also find something even better along the way, or at least all the ways in which something won’t work.

What tools have you found essential in the making of your work?

As I mentioned earlier, in addition to being an artist I’m also an engineer. When it comes to alt-process and experimental printmaking techniques there’s not a lot available in terms of equipment off the shelf and you end up having to make most of what you need if you can’t find old things second-hand. Living where I do there’s not really a second-hand market for things like vacuum printing frames or UV exposure units and so I have to use my engineering skills to design and make all of that equipment. For example, for these prints I built a completely new type of LCD-screen based contact printing system, and just recently I’ve built from scratch a digital UV projector which now lets me create much larger prints than I could ever make using the normal contact printing process. So I guess I’d consider my most useful tool to be myself, and my ability to make whatever I need to realise the outcome I’m going for.

Is there something in photography that you would like to try in the future?

I’m currently working on a kind of printing process using pigmented photopolymer which will significantly increase the flexibility of what I can produce. For example it opens up the ability to print colour images, images using natural earth pigments and images onto different substrates like metal and glass. Also now that I have my projector working I can move beyond the constraints of two dimensions. In essentially all alt-process printing methods the image is formed by putting a transparent negative directly into contact with the sensitised surface, which limits you to flat plates, but with projection I can project an image onto a three-dimensional object just as easily. I think I want to really blur the lines between photography, printmaking and sculpture.

How does your art affect the way you see the world?

When I move around the world in my day to day life I live very internally, my senses are used to help me navigate to where I’m going without bumping into things but there’s no conscious observation happening there. Put a camera into my hands and suddenly my focus shifts dramatically to the external and not just my vision, but also my hearing, sense of smell and touch. I think photography for me at least is almost like therapy, an essential method of grounding myself into the world I live in and forcing me to be present, observe and exist in reality, not just whatever abstraction goes on inside my head.

What’s on the horizon?

I’m currently making some large prints using my projector for a darkroom and alt-process group show in a town called Te Aroha this November, and then I have a solo exhibition at a gallery in a suburb of Auckland called Titirangi next March. Beyond that I’ve been talking to a person organising a ‘science and technology in art’ type exhibition for later next year in which I might integrate my alt-process printing and UV projection methods into an installation that would allow viewers of the exhibition to actively participate in and influence the print being made in real-time.

Thank you Andrew.
To earn more about the work of Andrew Burns please click on his name.