• BIO
Vaune Trachtman (b. Philadelphia) is an artist working across photography and printmaking, whose work honors historic processes while reimagining them through non-toxic means. Formerly a master printer of silver gelatin prints and asphaltum-based photogravures, she now creates photopolymer gravures using little more than light and water.
Vaune is a two-time Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 artist, a finalist and People’s Choice Award winner in Klompching Gallery’s FRESH annual, and a finalist for the International Hariban Award. She received the Olcott Family Award in The Print Center’s 97th ANNUAL International Competition. NOW IS ALWAYS was recognized as a Top Portfolio by Rfotofolio and an Outstanding Work by the Denis Roussel Awards.
A monograph of NOW IS ALWAYS was published by Tusen Takk Press in 2025 with a foreword by poet Major Jackson. Printed in Verona, Italy, the book received the Trifolio Special Award alongside titles from the Museum of Modern Art, Aperture, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and was shortlisted for the Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards.
Vaune lives and works in Vermont, in a former textile mill overlooking the Connecticut River.
• NOW IS ALWAYS: THE WORK
NOW IS ALWAYS is a series of photopolymer gravures with a surface roll on Awagami Shiramine washi paper. Editions range in size from 13 X 16 to 28 X 34 inches.
Process: Direct to plate photopolymer gravure, using light and water to create printing plates from digital images. Each print is made using soy based Akua ink and printed with an intaglio press.
To see Vaune pulling a photopolymer gravure print and talking about her process, either click on the page in this website called “See the printing” or visit her Vimeo page and watch the studio visit :
www.vimeo.com/1187418747
NOW IS ALWAYS • THE STORY
NOW IS ALWAYS began during the Depression when my father, Joseph Harold Trachtman (1914-1971), shot a few rolls of 127-format film near his father’s drugstore in Center City, Philadelphia. Nearly 90 years later, my sister found the negatives and gave them to me. Working from the original negatives, I’ve combined the people from his neighborhood with my own images, many of which were shot from windows and moving vehicles. NOW IS ALWAYS is our collaboration across time.
My father lived in Philly his entire life, and his images of friends and neighbors are firmly rooted on the 19th and Girard street corner. My images, on the other hand, are much less rooted. This is probably because I was pretty much on my own after my parents died—my father when I was five and my mother when I was 15—and I was rarely in one place for very long. Often the view out a car or train window felt more like home than wherever I was living. Over time, I’ve developed a kinship with blurred bridges and highways, trestles and roofs, the husks of industrial towns racing by at two or three in the morning. In this work, my father’s life becomes part of these landscapes– our shared and evanescent homes.
There’s obviously a personal aspect to NOW IS ALWAYS, but I want the work to be more expansive than a dialogue between the father I didn’t know and the daughter he knew only as a child. In NOW IS ALWAYS, I want to create a feeling of collapsed-yet-expanded time. Yes, I want to see what my father saw, and yes, I want him to see what I see. But I also want the viewer to look at the past, and I want the past to look right back; I want the viewer and the subject to each feel the gaze of the other. And by combining images taken almost a century apart, I also want to seamlessly integrate layers of technology and image-making history: his 1930’s point-and-shoot, my iPhone, his silver-gelatin negatives, my Photoshop files, our shared sunlight and water, and the traditions of ink, elbow grease, and an intaglio press.
The book, NOW IS ALWAYS was recently published by Tusen Takk Press, with a foreword by poet Major Jackson, designed by David Skoklin, and printed at Trifolio Press in Verona, Italy.
NOW IS ALWAYS is supported by a grant from the Vermont Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional support from the Tusen Takk Foundation and the Marble House Project.
Vaune Trachtman (b. Philadelphia) is an artist working across photography and printmaking, whose work honors historic processes while reimagining them through non-toxic means. Formerly a master printer of silver gelatin prints and asphaltum-based photogravures, she now creates photopolymer gravures using little more than light and water.
Vaune is a two-time Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 artist, a finalist and People’s Choice Award winner in Klompching Gallery’s FRESH annual, and a finalist for the International Hariban Award. She received the Olcott Family Award in The Print Center’s 97th ANNUAL International Competition. NOW IS ALWAYS was recognized as a Top Portfolio by Rfotofolio and an Outstanding Work by the Denis Roussel Awards.
A monograph of NOW IS ALWAYS was published by Tusen Takk Press in 2025 with a foreword by poet Major Jackson. Printed in Verona, Italy, the book received the Trifolio Special Award alongside titles from the Museum of Modern Art, Aperture, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and was shortlisted for the Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards.
Vaune lives and works in Vermont, in a former textile mill overlooking the Connecticut River.
• NOW IS ALWAYS: THE WORK
NOW IS ALWAYS is a series of photopolymer gravures with a surface roll on Awagami Shiramine washi paper. Editions range in size from 13 X 16 to 28 X 34 inches.
Process: Direct to plate photopolymer gravure, using light and water to create printing plates from digital images. Each print is made using soy based Akua ink and printed with an intaglio press.
To see Vaune pulling a photopolymer gravure print and talking about her process, either click on the page in this website called “See the printing” or visit her Vimeo page and watch the studio visit :
www.vimeo.com/1187418747
NOW IS ALWAYS • THE STORY
NOW IS ALWAYS began during the Depression when my father, Joseph Harold Trachtman (1914-1971), shot a few rolls of 127-format film near his father’s drugstore in Center City, Philadelphia. Nearly 90 years later, my sister found the negatives and gave them to me. Working from the original negatives, I’ve combined the people from his neighborhood with my own images, many of which were shot from windows and moving vehicles. NOW IS ALWAYS is our collaboration across time.
My father lived in Philly his entire life, and his images of friends and neighbors are firmly rooted on the 19th and Girard street corner. My images, on the other hand, are much less rooted. This is probably because I was pretty much on my own after my parents died—my father when I was five and my mother when I was 15—and I was rarely in one place for very long. Often the view out a car or train window felt more like home than wherever I was living. Over time, I’ve developed a kinship with blurred bridges and highways, trestles and roofs, the husks of industrial towns racing by at two or three in the morning. In this work, my father’s life becomes part of these landscapes– our shared and evanescent homes.
There’s obviously a personal aspect to NOW IS ALWAYS, but I want the work to be more expansive than a dialogue between the father I didn’t know and the daughter he knew only as a child. In NOW IS ALWAYS, I want to create a feeling of collapsed-yet-expanded time. Yes, I want to see what my father saw, and yes, I want him to see what I see. But I also want the viewer to look at the past, and I want the past to look right back; I want the viewer and the subject to each feel the gaze of the other. And by combining images taken almost a century apart, I also want to seamlessly integrate layers of technology and image-making history: his 1930’s point-and-shoot, my iPhone, his silver-gelatin negatives, my Photoshop files, our shared sunlight and water, and the traditions of ink, elbow grease, and an intaglio press.
The book, NOW IS ALWAYS was recently published by Tusen Takk Press, with a foreword by poet Major Jackson, designed by David Skoklin, and printed at Trifolio Press in Verona, Italy.
NOW IS ALWAYS is supported by a grant from the Vermont Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional support from the Tusen Takk Foundation and the Marble House Project.