Contemporary Visions

Over the last few years there has been a marked interest on the part of contemporary artists to revive the earliest techniques of photography. By retrieving the uniqueness of the daguerreotype, ambrotype, and tintype, contemporary artists have also opened up new possibilities of artistic expression through these processes. This recent re-emergence of long abandoned photographic techniques should not be viewed as nostalgia for the past or simply as the latest trend of historic revival. Rather, it is the expressive effect and hands-on quality of each technique that has intrigued these artists. What they have discovered is an alternative and, perhaps, a more authentic method for capturing images in a world in which computer and digital technology has threatened to predominate.

While all four of the contemporary artists featured in this exhibition share a common interest in the revival of both the technological process and the expressive capability of these labor intensive, chemically complicated, and time-consuming early photographic processes, their objectives are quite different.

Chuck Close, an artist known for his highly detailed, large-scale painted portraits from photographs, has recently employed the daguerreotype process. Collaborating with Jerry Spagnoli, an artist who has spent many arduous years researching and perfecting the revival of the daguerreotype process, Close has maintained his interest in portraiture and his emphasis on maximum visual information. Utilizing the harsh accuracy of the medium to expose issues of our inevitable mortality, he uses the daguerreotype's ability to capture detail in extraordinary clarity, and to accentuate undesirable, but unavoidable flaws of the subject's body.

Luis González Palma, a Guatemalan artist and architect, works with the ambrotype process to create portraits of Mayan Indians that engender feelings of isolation and melancholy. In stark contrast to Close, Palma rarely makes a straightforward photographic document. Rather, Palma uses the ambrotype process to connect to an ancient, bygone era and to evoke psychological issues. He utilizes the antique and mysterious look of the medium and embellishes it by adding mythic and religious symbols like angels' wings, thorns, roses, skulls, and halos to the images. In so doing, Palma emphasizes the expressive history of suffering of indigenous people.

stephen berkman

Stephen Berkman has revived the faithful representation of the early wet-collodion process. His long devotion to filmmaking ironically drew his attention to the earliest photographic technique that bears witness to the sense of "development" of images. The uneasy and enigmatic qualities in his glass plates can be attributed to the presence of a paradox: the capturing of a moment in combination with the suggestion of movement, as in film. Bridging the alchemical past and the cinematic present of photography, Berkman moves forward into the unpredictable future of photographic evolution.

jayne hinds bidaut

Mortality is the compelling theme present in the tintypes of Jayne Hinds Bidaut. Through her encounter with the tintype technique of the past, Bidaut uses the medium itself to address her concerns with lost species and lost history. The antiquated look of a blackened thin sheet of iron achieves both physical intimacy with the image and a sympathetic perspective on the demise of living forms. The faded tonalities, patinas, blurs, and flaws in her tintypes recall and revive the past.

Whereas the contemporary artists singled out here have his or her own artistic reasons for choosing to work with these obsolete processes, what remains as the connective link is their re-imagined explorations of "lost" technologies of the past.

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