About Us
Artist Statement
CHUCK JONES & SUZANNE BIRRELL
We make things meant to last 1,000 years.
In an age of digital images that vanish with corrupted hard drives and obsolete file formats, we create physical artifacts using 19th-century chemistry and precious metals. Some of our prints document real places and people Chuck photographed over 35 years. Others materialize computational hallucinations - AI-generated images of things that never existed - and anchor them into permanent form.
Both become heirlooms. Both outlive us.
WHO WE ARE
Chuck Jones has been in conversation with cameras since 1962, when he unwrapped his first Kodak Brownie Starflash at age 12. Over 62 years, he's mastered every major photographic technology invented in his lifetime: film processing (E6, C41, B&W), silver gelatin printing, Cibachrome, professional scanning, digital RAW workflow, pigment inkjet, and for the past 23 years, platinum-palladium contact printing.
Chuck spent eight years and 56,000 miles documenting vanishing cultures throughout Mexico. He's created 300,000+ RAW images. He's watched technologies he mastered - Kodachrome, Cibachrome - disappear entirely. And now he's entered the next transformation: using AI to generate images that never existed and printing them using chemistry that will outlast our civilization.
Suzanne Birrell is a formally trained screenwriter, award-winning playwright, middle school teacher, and professional bassist who tours with Half Broke Horses. She founded screenwriting groups and brings a storyteller's understanding of narrative, emotion, and visual rhythm to every print. Her watercolor toning transforms Chuck's platinum-palladium prints from stark documentation into emotional artifacts - adding warmth, nostalgia, and life to images of both real and imagined worlds.
Together, we bridge photography and painting, documentation and fiction, the past and whatever comes next.
WHAT WE MAKE
Every print begins with Chuck's vision - whether captured through a lens over decades of travel or generated through AI prompts describing worlds that never existed. He creates the platinum-palladium print using hand-mixed chemistry, UV exposure, and precious metals (platinum and palladium) that don't degrade. The prints have extraordinary tonal range, a distinctive glow in highlights, and archival stability measured in millennia, not decades.
Then Suzanne applies watercolor tones by hand. No two prints are identical. Her toning brings emotional texture - warmth or coolness, nostalgia or immediacy - that transforms each piece into something between photograph and painting. The watercolor settles into the paper's tooth, becoming part of the substrate, permanent as the platinum beneath it.
The platinum-palladium process is painstakingly slow. Multiple test prints are often required before we achieve the image suitable for watercolor toning. Each piece is handcrafted from chemistry to final brushstroke. We make 1/1 editions for our most significant work - one print, period, no duplicates possible.
WHAT WE DOCUMENT
Chuck's lens has always been drawn to what's endangered, overlooked, or taken for granted. Burros in Mexico. Chichimeca warriors. Traditional dancers. Weathered wood that tells stories in its grain. Snails drinking water at macro scale. The extraordinary elements hiding in places everyone else walks past.
"In the Old West, the buggy whip was in every man's hand," Chuck says. "I would have photographed it if I'd been alive with a camera back then."
Now we're doing something new: creating images of things that never existed and preserving them longer than many things that did. AI-generated petroglyphs printed in platinum-palladium. Fictional portraits that will outlast real photographs. Archaeological evidence of cultures that never were, made permanent through precious metals.
This work asks uncomfortable questions: What happens when fake documentation outlives real artifacts? When does fiction become history? If an AI-generated image is printed to last 5,000 years, is it more "real" than a digital photograph that corrupts in decades?
WHY PLATINUM-PALLADIUM
We chose platinum-palladium printing because permanence matters.
Digital files degrade. Cloud storage disappears. File formats become obsolete. Even traditional photographs fade - silver prints last 300-500 years at best, color prints mere decades.
But platinum and palladium are essentially inert. They don't oxidize, don't degrade, don't fade. The only weak point is the cotton rag paper substrate. With proper storage, these prints will survive 1,000 years easily. Possibly 5,000.
We're not making photographs for Instagram. We're making artifacts for deep time. Future archaeology. Physical evidence that humans once looked at these subjects - real or imagined - and thought they mattered enough to preserve in precious metals.
THE COLLABORATION
Our process is genuinely collaborative, though the work divides naturally:
Chuck handles capture (lens or AI), chemistry mixing, coating paper, UV exposure, development, and the base platinum-palladium print. His expertise across 62 years of photographic practice and 23 years of platinum printing determines the tonal foundation, the dMax, the highlight glow, the overall "bones" of each piece.
Suzanne brings the storyteller's eye - knowing which images need warmth, which need coolness, how much emotion to add without overwhelming the subject. Her watercolor toning is the final authorship, the moment each print becomes uniquely ours. She understands narrative arc in ways photographers often don't, and that understanding shows in how she guides the viewer's emotional journey through each image.
We both sign every print. Both are essential to the final work.
WHERE WE'RE GOING
After 62 years of photography, Chuck is entering what he calls "Camera 3.0" - the moment when cameras become reality-generation devices instead of light-capture devices. AI doesn't replace photography. It IS photography, evolved.
We're exploring what happens when you materialize computational hallucinations using the most permanent printing process ever invented. When you create fictional archaeology that outlasts real artifacts. When you print portraits of people who never existed to survive longer than photographs of people who did.
This work sits at the intersection of photography, painting, artificial intelligence, archaeology, and deep time. We're documenting this transformation - not as observers, but as practitioners making the work itself.
Our prints aren't just images. They're heirlooms, artifacts, and time capsules. They're meant to be held, framed, passed down, and eventually - centuries from now - discovered by people who might not know whether what they're looking at ever existed or was always fiction.
We invite you to become custodians of these artifacts. Choose carefully. You're preserving them for the next thousand years.
Chuck Jones & Suzanne Birrell
Birrell Jones Productions
Chimayo, New Mexico