(gentle violin music) I'm in Red Hook, New York at the studio of Lothar Osterburg to learn more about the intricate process of Photogravure and to learn more about how Lothar uses it in his work.

But first, I need to find where he is.

No way.

That is awesome.

You are inside the Tower of Babel.

- Hello.

Nice to meet you.

- Nice to meet you.

(violin music continues) - [Lothar] I am an artist working in printmaking, photography and sculpture and in various orders of those combinations.

I never loved photography in art school because it always looked to me like it was just surface and the surface just didn't interest me.

And I loved the ink of printmaking.

I loved paint, I loved the tactility of making art.

And when I first learned photogravure, photography suddenly had that tactile quality for me and I just suddenly fell in love.

So, I have a plate here.

Photogravure is a 19th century photographic printmaking process, that etches a continuous tone image into a copper plate and then is inked up and printed like a regular etching onto rag paper where you have a very deep, rich black in the shadows and very shallow, very light, transparent ink layers in the highlights and the mid tones.

So it's a really rich, beautiful, old printmaking process that very few people are doing.

(violin music continues) It's just an amazing experience.

Sometimes really nerve wracking too, but looks good to me.

(violin music) My process does involve probably way more processes, way more steps than absolutely necessary.

But I just love the journey there and all the derailments that you could have along the way.

I start building my models, whatever they may be, like the tower of Babel.

Then I just traditionally stage it, photograph it, sometimes in the studio with studio lighting, sometimes outside.

I bring them out and build them into the landscape and incorporate them.

Once I have the photograph, I then start making decision which ones to print.

And I print all my photographs in the 19th century photographic process of photogravure.

(violin music continues) So I build my models basically of anything that sort of comes to mind and anything that kind of inspires me.

Most of the times it is something that has been sitting in my memory for a while, something that was inspired by reading a book and some image popped up, an image that of course, has something to do with my own experience, but is becoming more like a universal experience.

It's much more also the idea of the emotional memory than a specific memory.

It's not like seeing the pyramids in Egypt for the first time, but the mood that I was in and the kind of all I was in when I first saw them, the scale of it's like, oh my God.

And to capture that, it's not just taking a snapshot or taking a photo or trying to replicate it, but it's also to get some emotional thing in there.

The materials could be very much that I'm on the beach and I see some kid building a sandcastle and say, "Oh my God, I could make my pyramids out of sand", or my museum out of sand, which I actually did, which I also built out of snow.

And here it is out of plaster.

So I then play with the material, see like what does the different material do, maybe to a singular idea or subject or model.

The tatami mats, I'm in the middle of weaving.

I got inspired by walking, trying to identify all the grasses out in our meadow and realizing that some of the grasses are in fact the grasses that they make the real tatami mats out of.

And then I found a smaller version of the same family of grasses that works in the scale I wanted to work in.

And I've kind of built my own loom for those, kind of figured out how to weave it in the scale I needed them.

So it's also for me the process of learning how is something even done.

So, and even if it's becomes a little weird and not off, it's actually, it's good.

It's good for what I want.

If you build a model that is perfect, it looks like a model, once it gets worn, then there is life.

In the piece and in our world around us, and the awe is because those pyramids have been eroded and kind of are no longer the at the original glory.

(violin music continues) When I said earlier, my final product was a photograph or a photogravure, that actually has been changing too.

I had a show where I was placing models behind the wall with lenses with magnifying glasses or lenses in the wall embedded, with a lens it looked like you looked through the viewer of a camera, except when you move around it's actually, you see it's 3D.

And that was a really amazing experience.

So I've started building more of those, including them in little boxes that are movable.

When I said earlier, like I'm a print maker, photographer and sculpture, it it seems right now I feel like I'm more like primarily a sculptor right now, than a photographer and than a print maker.

So it's, it's sort of reversed in the priority in the order.

But I think that's gonna constantly shift anyway.

(violin music continues)