BD Richardson is a Maryland resident whose works have won awards and been featured nationally and internationally. Born in Washington, D.C., Richardson attended George Washington University (B.A.) and American University (M.A.). In 1980, she was part of a women’s press group trip to China when the country had just cracked the door to the west; her photos from this period of Chinese history are of a China which will never again exist.
Marrying an Army officer, life took her to live in Paris and West Point, NY, for several years before returning to Montgomery County (MD) to start a business and family. It was at the U.S. Embassy in Paris in the early 1980s where she had her first photography exhibit. Her photographs have also appeared in various books, magazines and calendars.
An avid photographer since college, Richardson began experimenting several years ago with combining photography, both film and digital, with mixed media. She is currently pursuing several alternative processing methods.
Modern day tintypes are created by printing images on film and transferring the film image to aged metal using an emulsion transfer method. The transfers are done totally by hand and each is unique. The metal is aged using an involved hand-worked process. She also creates Salt and Collodion Chloride Prints in which digital negatives are used with traditional darkroom protocol dating from the mid-1800s--using sensitized paper, UV light, chemicals, etc. A more contemporary technique is achieved by printing on archival metallic paper which is then covered with high-grade plexiglas.
