Photos with a perk.

• Author: Luxner, Larry
• Position: Coffee as a photographic tool - Americas !Ojo!

COFFEE GROWERS DISTRAUGHT over the lowest world prices for coffee beans in 30 years could take a lesson from Saul Bolanos: if you can't sell them, turn them into art. Bolanos, a determined forty-year-old Costa Rican photographer, has perfected the art of cafegrafia--the use of powdered or liquid coffee as a pigment to make up the tones of a photographic image.

"Any coffee will do, though right now I am using Costa Rican coffee," says the soft-spoken artist, who runs a research lab in Ezcasu and claims to be the only photographer in the world using coffee instead of silver as an emulsion. "Being from a coffee-growing country, I wanted to do some native art, using coffee to make photographic images. It had never been done before."

Bolanos says he studied photochemistry in the great laboratories of Switzerland, France and Germany, and over the last two years has developed four different photographic processes involving coffee. "Some processes are faster than others. The on-paper process is the latest," he explains. "In the dry process, I use ground coffee as a pigment. It's such a fine pigment, like talcum. In the liquid process, I use liquid coffee that will react and combine with my secret emulsion. I coat supports--wood, metal or stone--with this emulsion."

Since 1990, the artist's work has been the focus of numerous gallery exhibitions, local newspaper articles and television programs. A pamphlet...