Get thee to Bowdoin…
The perfect exhibit for photograph nuts is hanging at Bowdoin College Museum of Art until April 5, 2009, so there’s no excuse for ANYONE not to get there. The Museum is open every day except Monday, and open Thursday evenings and Sunday afternoons as well.
“The Image Wrought – Historical Photographic Approaches in the Digital Age” is a cool marriage of then and now. As photography hurtles headlong into the digital age, and a new way of using digital photography seems to be discovered daily, it’s important to underscore that in the decades since 1839 there have been tons of different processes used to take a photograph. Gelatin silver has been around so long that many people think we should have stopped with it, but the processes have been evolving since the beginning.
Beatrice and Ethel Hatch by Charles Dodgson
(Lewis Carroll) This is an albumen silver print from a wet collodion negative.
(Above is an example of Anna Atkins’ cyanotypes. She was the first woman photographer AND the first photographer to publish a book (“British Algae”, 1843))
Here are some for you: daguerreotype, cyanotype, ambrotype, palladium, gum bichromate, wet plate collodian, carbon print, chrysotype, argentotype and… gelatin silver! I’ll bet there are many, many more and you can find them all in in a couple of great books featured in the glass cases throughout the exhibit. Here are two: “Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes” by Lyle Rexler (Abrams, 2002) and “The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes” Second Edition, Christopher James (Delmar).
But the exhibit at Bowdoin includes some pretty bigtime practitioners – from William Henry Fox Talbot to Mark Osterman. I have never seen an original Talbot, Hill & Adamson (salted paper print) or Anna Atkins (cyanotype) before, let alone a Carleton Watkins mammoth plate landscape, so this exhibit is an opportunity I’m very grateful for.
Above: Talbot’s salted paper print from calotype negative “The Ancient Vestry”, 1845.
If you are a photographer and are not a student of the History of Photography you are missing most of the iceberg. This is a great exhibit to whet your appetite to understand how photography has evolved into what you spend so much time doing!
If you ARE a student of the history of photography you’ll just revel in the examples before you, hold your breath while you roll up the velvet covers on some of the most fragile images, and get that much further along in the “science” of each process. Don’t expect to have it all memorized any time soon, but each book I study or exhibit I work through I pick up some major breakthroughs in the understanding of it all.
The contemporary practitioners are definitely holding their own in this exhibit. Two of the top images presented are by France Scully Osterman and Mark Osterman, the couple who singlehandedly revived many of the historic processes in the 1980′s. Mark’s image “Blowing Smoke” (ambrotype on ruby glass, with pigment rubbed into the silver deposits) alone will bring me back to the exhibit several more times before April 5.
Blowing Smoke © Mark Osterman
France’s warm and radiant image “Laszlo and Carole, 2002″ (waxed salted paper print from wet collodion negative) is so intensely beautiful, it’s hard to pull away from it.
Laszlo and Carole, 2002 © France Scully Osterman
The Ostermans’ website will provide you with another afternoon’s worth of study and delight, so don’t miss it.
A couple other images to note and then you’ll have to go yourself and let me know what hit your buttons: Adam Lubroth did a great piece called “30 Pasageros” (paused in cars at red light) and it’s a fabulous modern gum bichromate layered with bright primary colored pigments.
A stunning argyrotype by Billie Mercer titled “Maurice”, 1997 is another unforgettable image.
Maurice © Billie Mercer
Another favorite is Dan Burkholder’s “Flatiron in Spring, New York II” – a platinum print made in 2005 from a 1997 negative and sporting digitally applied color – it’s just plain gorgeous.
Flatiron in Spring, New York II” © Dan Burkholder
None of the images reproduced here do them justice, so get thee to Bowdoin early and often to take advantage of this terrific traveling show stopping for a few months in Maine before heading south back over the line forever.
February 16, 2009 at 11:42 pm
Thanks for the mention about the exhibition and about my image.
February 18, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Hello Heather,
Thank you so much for your comments about my plate, Blowing Smoke. That piece is part of a series called Confidence and relates to my days performing a traveling medicine show in Eastern Pennsylvania. The upturned phonograph horn was part of an Edison cylinder phonograph I was given by my great aunt when I was twelve. It was important part of my evolution as I learned many vaudeville era songs by listening to the old cylinders. The smoke reference has to do with the smoke and morrors aspects of the show we performed from the back of a model T Ford.
By the way, I also made a collodion negative of that same arrangement. It is just now being released as a salted paper print next month at the Howard Greenberg Gallery (NYC) and Tilt Gallery (Phoenix)
Best regards,
Mark Osterman