Koenig explains the process of gumoil photography as follows, “Each gumoil image is hand-crafted after coating a sheet of 100% rag paper with sensitized liquid gum arabic and contact-exposing it to a transparent or translucent positive under intense ultraviolet radiation. The coated sheet is then developed in water, thoroughly dried, and later rubbed with a dark pigment such as lamp black oil paint. Excess pigment is wiped off and the paper is briefly dipped in a bleach bath to oxidize away (etch) some of the light-hardened residual gum arabic. This leaves the next tonal region of the picture open to a second pigment application. The sequence is repeated until the print is finished over the course of several days or weeks. It is the successive etchings and applications of oil colors which lead to the richness and dimensionality of the finished print. No two gumoil prints made from the same transparent positive can ever be truly identical; there are too many variables for exact replication.” 
After a career in academic psychology at Stanford and the University of New Mexico, followed by several years in private practice, Karl Koenig pursued different interests: art, photography, lithography, silkscreen and non-silver photography. In 1990, he created a new — but old-looking — ‘alternative process’ which he called polychromatic gumoil photography. Koenig published a book, Gumoil Photographic Printing, and several articles on the discovery. Soon he found himself giving university lectures, doing demonstrations, leading workshops and exhibiting work worldwide based on the process. Perhaps, his most important work was his series of photographs taken on multiple trips to Europe to document buildings and grounds of the ten remaining camps of Nazi Germany. Many of those images are included in Koenig’s definitive book on gumoil photography, Fragments: Architecture of the Holocaust, An Artist’s Journey Through The Camps.
Karl Koenig’s memorial exhibition will hang through the October 27 at New Grounds Print Workshop & Gallery, 3812 Central Avenue, SE, Suite 100 B, Albuquerque, NM 87108, (505) 268-8952, www.newgroundsprintshop.com.
