A Pocket Watch in Seltzer Water: Barbara Hazen's Time Piece

Barbara Hazen's photograph "Bubbles" — a rusted pocket watch submerged in seltzer water, its nicks catching carbonation — was selected for the cover of Issue #38 of Dodho Magazine's print edition, capping a career pivot that began when she closed her cookie dough business in 2008.

Hazen, American, trained at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and later at the California Culinary Academy, spent years as a pastry chef before redirecting her creative energy toward photography. Her work has appeared in numerous group exhibitions and photographic publications, spanning projects on family memory, domestic environments, impermanence and the personal histories inside everyday objects.

In an interview accompanying the cover selection, she traced the arc plainly. "It was not until I closed my cookie dough business in 2008 that I decided to put my creative energy into photography," she said. "Over the years, I took many classes and workshops to find my voice."

How a pastry chef became an alt-process printer

The kitchen, it turns out, was rehearsal. "It wasn't until I started exploring alternative processes in photography that I realized I was using the same skills I had developed as a pastry chef — creativity, innovation, visual awareness, precision, science, passion, and adaptability," Hazen said. People assumed she'd become a food photographer. Except for Papyrus, she hasn't found "anything new to bring to this field."

Her practice leans on traditional printing: cyanotype, platinum-palladium and photogravure. She learned platinum-palladium first and loved its warmth and tonality; classic cyanotype's Prussian blue left her cold until she discovered the duotone process — cyanotype over platinum-palladium — which gave her creative control over toning to achieve a steely blue-grey. Photogravure was a longer itch: first glimpsed roughly 35 years ago at Crown Point Press, where her stepfather was printing large artworks, it eventually led her from copperplate engraving to polymer photogravure. "Inking plates again brings back the hands-on work I love," she said. She often prints the same image in several techniques before choosing.

What turned her lens personal?

Memory Keepers, her project on personal objects and aging, emerged from grief. Hazen became a caregiver to her brother and her mother, both of whom died of dementia within five years of each other. "Fearing I might have the same fate; I wanted to document a bit of my life with photographs to tell my story," she said. Antique collecting was a hobby she shared with her mother; the objects she owned or borrowed became the raw material, and her intent was to create keepsakes for her children.

Bittersweet used flowers — appreciated in bloom, "discarded as soon as they lose a petal" — as a metaphor for life's fleeting nature. Impermanence documented the aftermath of a massive fire in which hundreds of lives were irrevocably altered within minutes. "My aim was to embrace impermanence by documenting what is right before me with my camera, but will never be again," she said.

Why photograph discarded watches?

Time Piece, the series behind the Dodho cover, sets aside the personal register. Hazen photographs vintage watches found in flea markets, printed in copperplate photogravure on textured Hahnemühle Copperplate paper — a tactile final print, she argues, that echoes the object itself. "Because the watches no longer serve their original purpose or function, I've tried to elevate their old, rusted character with renewed beauty and life," she said. Printing them larger than actual size gives them "a grandeur that would otherwise be lost."

"Bubbles" came from what she calls experimental joy: having noticed how bubbles adhere to glassware, she dropped a pocket watch into seltzer water. The rust and nicks caught the bubbles. The picture made itself, more or less.

Her method of selecting objects is equally instinctive. After giving her mother her last haircut and saving the locks, she photographed the hair on an old scale pulled from storage — only realizing afterward that the scale was labeled "Family Scale."

Hazen still cooks daily alongside her photographic work, hunting for new techniques in both. Recently that has meant multi-plate photogravure with color, hand-colored platinum-palladium prints, and two new projects she hopes will see some light in the coming year.